That's because, as they explicitly write: "Android follows the package and class namespace conventions defined by the Java programming language". And obviously, the names in the packages are carried over, including sun.*, and the documentation is gonna follow that -- though the official name of the runtime is Dalvik (and ART), not Java or JVM or anything like that.

As I wrote, that was intentional, so that it's immediately familiar to Java programmers. That's just at the superficial API level though, which Oracle contested in court and I don't recall HNers being on their side...

Nobody was ever meant to use it to replace Java in their Java deployments and enterprise apps, or to run Java apps as is on that environment. And Google never promoted it as such -- as a Java replacement. Only as a Java-like environment specifically for Android development, and tied to the specific needs of its OS and devices.

What Android actually runs is a different language implementation through and through, with a different scope (target OS, environments, use etc) and a different VM, GC and tons of different APIs, with tons of not used APIs compared to the Java one's too (Swing for starters). And it's own bytecode of course.

So why should it follow Oracle's Java versions and progress, when it's NOT meant as a Java replacement? It has its own roadmap.

Heck, even the Java-like code behind the APIs, what's not 100% Googles, is not Oracle's or Sun's, but from the open source Apache Harmony project.