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I wonder why Google chose Java in the first place, instead of a Python runtime...

Wasn't Android developed by another company that was then later acquired by Google?

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/aug2005/tc200...

At the time, most mobile phone dev was done in Java (and probably still is today). It seems natural to want to leverage those developers for the new OS rather than have them learn a whole new skillset.

duh. you're right; I forgot about that.

impressive then that in such a short period of time, Infinite Loop got so many people to develop in an "obscure" language/SDK.

Not to mention that the number of developers whom can create in Java vastly outnumbers those in Python.

Does python runtime have a native interface like JNI?

Android was quickly leveraging a lot of C and C++ code to get the system up and running. Using Java's JNI may have helped bootstrap that process faster.

Yes, you can interface with C/C++. http://www.swig.org/

Not only that, you can also extend Python with C/C++ - http://docs.python.org/release/2.5.2/ext/intro.html

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