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To me, it's more that Android forgot to include other languages. But maybe it was intentional? You have no choice but to write drivers for the phones special hardware, but you don't have to write bindings for all those drivers to other languages ... only the ones (one?) you chose to support.

I'm not as familiar with iOS ... is there broad language support for that OS?

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I don't think so. Look at C# - completely alien to JVM yet getting more and more cross-platform traction via Mono and Xamarin. I think it's more about language robustness and appeal. Also switching from Java to C# you loose less than when switching to Python language feature wise.

Language support has nothing to do with drivers... All the hardware drivers have C or C++ interfaces.

And every C/C++ interface requires a set of language bindings that allow you to call them from say ... Python (if you want to call that Language supported). If the core language runs on a device but you're constantly calling native code, why not write in the language that's considered native?

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