I half expected the article to reference the Oracle Java API fiasco. That could definitely murky the waters for Android. This, at least, is pretty credible threat to Android.
I wish they'd replace Java stuff with something like Go , just get rid of Art/Dalvik . Java is very verbose and the xmls and build tools are all really hard work.
I am obviously being naive here. It probably can't be done
Earlier today there was a link to a talk about the state of Go. The link below shows that Go 1.5 is working on Android and experimental on iOS. What does "working" mean? No idea. I would bet that Google has been developing another development language for Android since a ruling in favor of Oracle would would be a huge financial burden for Google.
>What does "working" mean?
That you can write JNI apps in Go. You can't access to almost any of the platform APIs that way, so it is really not intended at writing entire apps in Go.
What it would allow you to do is to write something like a Rest library in Go and share it between the desktop, iOS (depending on the state of Go on that platform) and Android apps.
Go is still garbage collected. Supporting Objective C, Lua or even Rust would be more meaningful in terms of improving performance.
You should have a look at Kotlin. It removes almost all of Java's verbosity and the best part is that you can already write Android apps in Kotlin since the compiler emits java's bytecode.