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what is this, again?
When this project was first conceptualized, it was thought of as a translation layer - something akin to Wine. However, after becoming more familiar with the Android platform, it seems that there is a more interesting way to frame this.
If you read through https://source.android.com/docs/compatibility/cdd, even the oldest linked https://source.android.com/static/docs/compatibility/1.6/android-1.6-cdd.pdf, you may be intrigued by the following:
... For this reason, the Android Open Source Project [Resources, 4] is both the reference and preferred implementation of Android. ...
After reading through a reasonably recent version of this document, it would seem that a Linux distribution which uses this project to run android applications, and creatively interprets some of the requirements, could be shipped on a device and that device could be branded as an android device (provided that this project ever matures to a point where it can run the full compatibility test suite)
While this is mostly fully academic, it suggests that this project could be seen as a work-in-progress core part of an alternative implementation of Android, or possibly as a reframing of the android platform as something akin to the Qt platform - a framework for applications to use, which is a pseudo-platform on top of a different platform (in Qt's case, this ensures easier portability of the resulting apps; in our case, the only platform we can realistically support is Linux, since most apps use native libraries. BSDs with Linux compatiblity layers should also work fwiw (THIS WAS NOT TESTED), but it's debatable whether that counts.) Funnily enough, bionic libc seems to be decently shimmable to either glibc or musl, so that gives us binary compatibility between glibc and musl systems.