LibreELEC uses the latest drivers for eg. the GPU, VPU, ffmpeg, mpp video codecs, other components, Linux packages like Samba, dvb dongles etc. which is a lot older on Android.
Eg, Android uses Samba v2 while LE uses v4.9
With Android you also have a minimum of 850MB RAM already in use and more than 30 google services running in the background interfering and collecting your data while LibreELEC only uses 250MB RAM and can run from a 4GB micro-sd card. 5 years from now, you can still build the latest LibreELEC and it will work out of the box while Android will require updates from Google, Rockchip, Radxa and all the component vendors to adapt it to a new Android OS while at that time some of the vendors might have gone out of business which will complicate things.
LE also has much better 4K@50/60hz video playback compared to Android since all the power can be used just for video rendering and not be wasted on rendering the Android UI and services too. CPU usage playing the same videos are sometimes a 1/3 or 1/2 of that of Android.
Lots of users also have better playback and compatibility with their DVB dongles watching Live TV with PVR addons in LE compared with using Kodi on Android.
You can also use software decoding in LE and play 1080p Netflix which is blocked on Android since Google/Netflix only allows hardware acceleration on Android for it and must certify the device first which is not possible on open-source ARM devices.
I would say running LE is also more simplistic and can work well with wireless remotes compared to a whole Debian OS that might take some time to setup and is not very remote friendly sitting further away on a couch. For users only wanting to stream or watch movies, not do anything else, it works great.
I’m trying to find ways to dual-boot Android and LibreELEC so people can use Android and when they intend to do serious movie watching or streaming to boot easily to LE.
