I also came to the conclusion that it's because:

* Developers are adopting it to begin with, without the announcement, locally to Orlando it's a rising language for Android developers, nobody's forcing the language on them, they try it, like it and bam. * Oracle lawsuit makes it a no brainer to accept other languages into the Android stack that could get them off their back. * Kotlin native would allow Android to maybe someday ditch the Java based VM altogetherm potentially.

The tooling is also great and the language seems to be rather healthy.