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by cwyers 3739 days ago
If copying the APIs is only valuable for compatibility, why did Google do it? Android isn't compatible with any Java apps.
2 comments

It's compatible with many Java libraries and IDEs etc. It isn't compatible with Java apps because the UI framework has to be different on a phone. Porting Java apps thereby requires changing only a minority of things rather than everything.

It's like asking why you can write C programs on Windows even though it doesn't provide an X server.

Libraries, though.