The other option was C#, I haven’t read the Android book. But have read the legal fillings and internal documents from the discovery process during the Google vs Oracle lawsuit for Java patents. It was clear in it C++ was never a good candidate due to memory management and tooling being behind Java and C#. C# was closed source back then and Java was the only option.
Yes it does. Watch this https://youtu.be/4Q07f4-wd3c