That's a complete myth, really. The Scala ecosystem has its fair share of problems, but Odersky and his lab's involvement and stewardship have never been one of them.
Just an example: Why wasn't it a priority to make scala run well on dalvik? The place is taken by kotlin and is one of its strongest selling points.
Because there never was a real demand for it? What does that have to do with Scala's academic roots?
And what makes you think Scala needs Android to be successful? Android is completely irrelevant to most Java developers.
Core team didn't care about Android. Simple as that. :-)