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Comment by viraptor | Hacker News Reader

That's going to be interesting to see. Apple could pull off the change in infrastructure and tell devs to deal with it. But could Google do the same with lots of apps in the store which contain native code?

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Not an Android developer, but it seems that all I hear is the upgrade treadmill for Android APIs. That is without changing the underlying architecture.

Not sure what you're talking about here, Android supports 4 architectures right now (supported 6 before) and adding one more isn't such a big deal.

I know android itself can support multiple archs, but does a (random play store app with native library) support them or even test them all?

Most Play apps have no NDK code so they work fine.

Not claiming it's a representative sample, but my phone has 160 subfolders underneath /data/app (i.e. user-installed/-updated apps), of which after a quick count 52 include native libraries.

I don't even have that many games on my phone, so those only account for six of those apps, with the largest fraction being various multimedia apps (camera, video player, image editor, music player, even my e-book reader…)

The top Play apps and games use native libraries. Here's a CppCon talk that mentions that 75% of the top 100 Play apps and games use C++.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=2Y47g8xNE1o&feature=shares

Yup. They can and they can also tell the devs to deal with it. Android devs, like me, aren’t into android development for the love of the dev tools and the environment (which are pathetic at best). They are there because they have to — one way or the another.

Well the benefit of having Java/Kotlin being the default dev language for Android is there's no need to recompile to run those apps on another arch. Only apps with native code will be an issue.

Where "only" means majority of games, especially anything created with common game frameworks, and non-trivial apps with native dependencies they pulled in.

"Multimedia" apps (anything image, video or audio-related, and even my e-book reader) are probably another large fraction (and since I don't have all that many separate game apps installed – mostly a few emulators only – they're actually the largest fraction of apps with native libraries on my phone).

When Intel was trying to make x86 phones a thing they supplied Google with an ahead-of-time binary translation system. The same could be done with RISC-V.

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