Android has never used the JVM: it used to translate Java bytecode to its Dalvik VM format, called DEX, and executed that. Nowadays, all Android apps are compiled to native code ahead of time, though still using DEX as an intermediate representation in the .apk, and compiling on the device itself before first load.
Does this project do something like that OR does it use the JVM OR does it do something else altogether?
Yep, it runs on the JVM by basically doing the reverse of Dalvik, translating the DEX back into JVM bytecode, and they supply Java implementations of the Android APIs.
https://github.com/kksimp/Mac.apk/wiki/How-Mac.apk-Works has all the interesting details.
4 seconds looking at the Readme shows that it does indeed run the java code on a JVM
> no virtual machine
lol.
Well, a JVM isn't really a VM in the sense that the author was talking about. No VM means "no virtualization of the android OS itself"