The upcoming release of Android studio/it's Gradle plugin support a lot of Java 8 features right out of the box. No need for plugins to patch things like lamdas
Honestly though, I think this is really more a result of the Android SDK team being drug kicking and screaming by the competition. Solutions like React Native, Kotlin, Xamarin, RetroLambda, and of course Kotlin were starting to become very viable alternatives to the official SDK.
