The Android emulation layer is quite good and it runs on many mass market Xperia phones from Sony:

https://docs.sailfishos.org/Support/Supported_Devices/

It is not using Android kernel - it uses a Linux kernel with android features enabled and compile time & runs Android binary drivers for hardware that has no native Linux driver via a binary adaptation layer called libhybris (also used by some Ubuntu Touch devices).

The Android emulation layer nowadays runs in a container that talks to the Android bits in the kernel and to the blobs via libhybris.