What is the main source of your daily downloads of apps on your phone? It is estimated that many people's answer is that the phone comes with an app store.
In the early stage of Android, the domestic application ecology is more chaotic and disorderly, users can download various App installation packages by themselves, and can also use pea pods, app treasures and many other tripartite market platforms to integrate downloads. However, with the maturity and scale of the entire industry system, the app stores of mainstream mobile phone brand manufacturers have been born one after another and have become the default download channel for users.
So, how is the current development performance of domestic app stores? It just so happens that we can take the recent user discussion of the popularity of 64-bit App as the entry point, and analyze it a little.
Chip replacement has forced application innovation
Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen1 is the latest Android flagship processor this year, but it is very embarrassing that the CPU part of this chip is based on the ARMv9 public architecture, which is composed of 1 X2 super core and 3 A710 large cores and 4 A510 cores. Among them, the X2 and A510 directly removed support for 32-bit apps compared with the previous generation, and only the A710 core continued to retain this feature.
In other words, in the Snapdragon 8 Android flagship machine, if the user installs a 32-bit App, then it can only call the A710 core to operate. Originally able to rely on the low power consumption of the core, but now has been calling the large core, the result is to increase the processor running burden, long running or multiple 32-bit App at the same time, will greatly increase the power consumption of the whole machine, and lead to heat and power consumption increased.
Therefore, the only solution is to replace all applications in the phone from 32 bits to 64 bits. In fact, 32-bit as an early application open format, should have been completely eliminated, from the performance point of view of a single 32-bit software maximum call memory does not exceed 4G, and now many apps and large game software demand for memory are far more than 4G, so 64-bit App is the best application at present.
However, it is also due to the chaos and disorder of the Android application ecosystem, the number of apps is huge and uneven, many apps have long been in a state of suspension, or developers are lazy, resulting in the coexistence of 32-bit and 64-bit apps on the market. The Snapdragon 8 Gen1 further abandoned support for 32-bit apps due to the latest generation of CPU architecture, which triggered the problem.
How well do mobile app stores support 64-bit apps?
Obviously, whether users can download and install 64-bit apps for the first time will greatly affect the actual experience of the Snapdragon 8 flagship machine. Therefore, the support of mobile app stores for 64-bit apps has become a key.
Let's talk about the best done. Apple first asked developers to support 64-bit new applications in February 2015, and in 2017, the iOS11 system stopped supporting 32-bit apps, and AppStore completely removed 32-bit apps, that is, since then, the iOS application ecosystem has fully shifted to the 64-bit camp, and has maintained a far leading position in the Android camp.
Huawei officially sent an email notification in November 2021 that huawei application market will fully implement the 64-bit Android application version, in order to better improve the Android application performance experience and reduce power consumption. Specifically, apps listed on the Huawei store must contain 64 bits from February 1, 2022, and from September 1, 2022, the Huawei app market will no longer accept any 32-bit versions of apps.
Xiaomi App Store in the face of the recent Snapdragon 8 flagship user feedback, in their own app store shelves 64-bit App zone, convenient for users to download the first time; while OPPO, vivo, Samsung, and Tencent app treasure and so on are not currently launched new actions, many of the apps downloaded by users are still unable to distinguish between 32 bits or 64 bits.
From this point, it can be seen that in terms of 64-bit App support, only Huawei and Apple are relatively the best, Xiaomi responds the fastest to users, and other app stores are not ideal.
In April 2021, Xiaomi, OPPO, vivo, Tencent App Bao, and Baidu Mobile Assistant jointly announced that they will be ready for the full popularization of the 64-bit architecture by August 2022. This means that Android users are not far from fully switching to 64-bit applications, with less than 4 months left.