It's safe to say that Android is definitely moving away from Java in terms of new language features. I mean, if you want to support older Android versions and use modern Java features or newer parts of standard libraries, you'll usually have to rely on desugaring or making sure you're using classes that are supported in Android.

IMO, Android is moving away from modern versions of Java. Java and its underlying standard library will always play a big role in Android development.

The way I see it, Kotlin makes a lot of sense for Android development because Kotlin can introduce new things in its standard library that make older versions of Java look ancient. It's not like you can use new Java features in Android, so using Kotlin makes people not care as much about new features of Java that are only available in modern versions of Java.

It is hard to move away from Java, when the whole JetBrains tooling, Gradle and Maven Central depend on Java ecosystem.

Including the main sales pitch of Kotlin, its Interoperability with Java.

> unless you're not using the jvm (which is owned by oracle, despite being opensource)

It's not "the JVM"; JVM is a spec that has many implementations, you are probably referring to Oracle JRE/JDK.