Nope, that former product of Myriad Group was called “Dalvik Turbo” and was an alternative and supposedly faster Java Virtual Machine (JVM) to Googles Dalvik JVM. This was a product for Android < 5.
Alien Dalvik always was an emulation layer (see below) to run a stripped down AOSP (Android Open Source Project) on foreign (“alien”) operating systems.
Since Android switched from DVM to ART in 5.0 this approach was no longer working.
This is also not true, there was no “switch”: Dalvik JVM is still there, pure Java apps need it. Google only added the “Android Runtime (ART)” interface (often also called “native interface” and the apps using it “native apps” in contrast to Java apps) for compiled apps written in C++, C etc. If there would have been a “switch” Android 5 had been without any apps, initially.
Later the Anbox approach was used, …
Alien Dalvik predates Anbox (which became Waydroid much later) and they are completely unrelated (e.g., carry incompatible licenses, GPLv3 for Anbox / Waydroid), except for the basic concept of running an ASOP para-virtualised on something else. It is all about emulating the missing interfaces (bionic instead of libc etc. etc.) on that “something else”. Not that hard, if one uses a classic Linux distribution (as SailfishOS) as underpinning, but IIRC Alien Dalvik was also offered for WinCE (aka Windows Mobile etc.), WebOS etc.
Wait, didn’t I write all this before?
I did:
- Alien Dalvik on older devices has the same naming as Android App support on newer devices - #4 by olf
- Privacy and security of SailfishOS - #59 by olf
… which isn’t possible on older devices since the kernel doesn’t support the needed features.
Well, the technically correct answer is Android App-Support Update? - #13 by olf
P.S.: Please search first, and do not present guesswork based on the similarity of (badly chosen) names as facts.