alt Hacker NewsI'm pretty sure that the majority of shops that aren't worrying about Android have moved on from Java 8. The JVM team only keep Java 8 working for customers paying them lots of money for extended support contracts. And that's only because they have this long-term extended support system for all LTS JVM releases (they are also still supporting 11 in a similar manner).
On the other hand, Android doesn't even support Java 8. It supports the long-dead Java 7 plus a subset of Java 8 features. Android essentially froze their core application runtime in amber over ten years ago and have just been adding layer upon layer of compiler-level sugar ever since. The effect is an increasing loss of the benefit of being on the Java platform, in terms of code sharing.
Didn't Google win the lawsuit with Oracle?
I never understood why they do not track the OpenJDK versions. I don't work on Android apps.. but it seems mildly insane to basically have a weird almost-Java where you aren't even sure if you can use a given Java lib.
Ex: I just took a look at a dependency I'm using
https://github.com/locationtech/spatial4j
Can it be used on Android..? I have no idea
From what I understand it's a weird stack now where nobody is actually writing Java for Android.
I'm still waiting for the day I can write a Clojure app for my phone..
(and not a Dart chat app.. but something actually performant that uses the hardware to the full extent)