No, it is a political thing.

I guess the Java bias is very strong among the ex-Sun and ex-Danger OS developers that have joined the team since the early days.

You see this on Google IO presentations from the last couple of years, when the audience asks about alternatives, including existing JVM languages.

With the legal issues they have had with Oracle, I'm surprised they didn't move on from the JVM/Java much earlier.

Well, they started them, by not wanting to play ball.

And since I expect someone to post Jonathan Schwartz public comment commending them, here goes what Gosling had to say about it.

"We were all really disturbed, even Jonathan just decided to put on a happy face and tried to turn lemons into lemonade, which annoyed a lot of folks at Sun."

https://www.wired.com/2012/04/gosling-slime/

Companies like IBM, Atego, Aicas, MicroEJ, Excelsior, ARM among many others, never had known issues dealing with either Sun or Oracle licenses, while providing their own Java compilation chains and hardware specific APIs.

They're kind of trying with Dart and https://flutter.io/

Actually that is more the Dart team searching for ways to stay relevant, than the Android team caring about it.