Seriously, when is the last time mobile phones used hardware decoding for showing images? Flip phones in 2005?
I know camera apps use hardware encoding but I doubt gallery apps or browsers bother with going through the hardware decoding pipeline for hundreds of JPEG images you scroll through in seconds. And when it comes to showing a single image they'll still opt to software decoding because it's more flexible when it comes to integration, implementation, customization and format limits. So not surprisingly I'm not convinced when I repeatedly see this claim that mobile phones commonly use hardware decoding for image formats and software decoding speed doesn't matter.