You are right.

The code for these embedded devices is JITted and I know because i worked on them. It also included some AOT but not much. In the past one of our guys benchmarked against an older version of Dalvik and had us at about 5x with those VM's.

To be fair they are not hotspot and it does have startup time issues because unlike the embedded version of our JIT's it doesn't feature MVM. However, a lot of this is configurable and easily fixable. Hotspot is remarkably tuneable and if MVM is added (which is possible) could probably beat ART in startup time as well...

ART is pretty fast by now though and pretty well understood. I don't think Google would switch to hotspot and I don't think it will need that for compliance either. They might just reuse some libraries that can be common and that's it.

Every time an Android device installs its monthly security update, it spends an inordinate amount of time, with the screen on, "optimizing" every single app.

pjmlp: original poster above referred to Hotspot, not arbitrary JVMs. Clearly Android devices can run VMs with both JIT and AOT (they do, after all), what OP questioned was whether Hotspot in particular (not some arbitrary VM) is a good VM on a mobile device. Given Hotspot's somewhat underwhelming startup speed even on desktop class computers, I think that's a very reasonable technical question to ask, and not FUD in any way.