> Why can't it run on a host JVM given some libraries implementing the same APIs? That's a hideously huge API surface to double-implement - with a new and uniq

> Why can't it run on a host JVM given some libraries implementing the same APIs? That's a hideously huge API surface to double-implement - with a new and unique set of bugs reducing it's usefulness in CI builds - for slightly improved performance in a relatively niche dev edge case (!ndk android dev without android hardware.) You'd also need to skip conversion to DEX format (or convert back) to run on a standard JVM. But your suggestion isn't technically impossible. You could (re)implement the subset of APIs your application happens to use yourself, if you really wanted to go down that route - which by virtue of being a much smaller subset of the APIs than the entire Android Java API surface, wouldn't even be practically impossible.