But there’s a narrative beyond raw performance. The existence of device-specific codec binaries reflects an ecosystem compromise between universality and efficiency. Android’s diversity — a blessing for choice, a headache for developers — forces authors to produce multiple builds: x86, Arm64-v8a, and the once-ubiquitous Armv7. Each build is a promise: we’ve done the extra work so your hardware can do the extra work, faster and cooler. It’s an implicit pact between software craftsmen and the heterogeneous world of hardware manufacturers.