Although there is some controversy about it, more and more people watch movies on their smartphone, thanks to apps such as Netflix, Disney+ or Prime Video; The experience may not be like that of a TV, but on the other hand, mobile screens are getting better and wireless headphones offer higher audio quality. In the same way, apps like Spotify are mainly mobile.
However, something that perhaps many people do not know is that All these multimedia apps have several obstacles to function properly; And it is not as simple as simply playing the video through the screen or the audio file through the speakers.
When an Android app needs to reproduce any type of multimedia file, use the so -called audio and video codecs to decode the content; The problem is that You cannot access these codec directly, for security reasons. The codecs have always been the favorite method of hackers to enter an operating system, using all kinds of techniques such as modified files. Google learned this for the bad, with Stagefright, a guy who attacks the Android multimedia system, which had a monolithic design in which all components, including codecs, had access to many operating system permits.
Therefore, now Android has an independent process system that runs every time an app needs to reproduce a multimedia file. For example, codecs now They run in their own independent process and separated from the rest of the system, which adds a lot of security; The problem is that it also adds complications and inefficiencies, since each multimedia data transfer requires a CPU call. That means that multimedia apps consume many resources on Android, and that is what Google wants to change.
As they have discovered in Android Authorityfrom Android 16, multimedia codecs They can be executed within the app process that needs them, instead of running separately in your own process. In this way, when the app needs a codec to reproduce a video or a song, you can run it directly in its process and without making additional calls to the CPU.
In practice, this should translate into a performance improvement and a reduction in battery consumption When we use multimedia apps, including the aforementioned Netflix and Spotify, but also apps such as YouTube or reproduce music files in local memory. According to Google’s filtered presentation, the company’s objective with this change was to improve the performance with the AAC Audio Codec, after discovering that 50% of the CPU cycles were dedicated to this type of unnecessary calls.
The good news is that this change will not be able to reopen the old security holes, since Google will force app developers to create these codecs in a safe language for memory like Rust.
