Eh, you’re discounting the different development targets that the android and ios ecosystems use. From the jump almost all android developers are shooting for ancient versions of the api because no phone gets more than a few major versions. Ios developers are targeting the latest supported api so from the start it’s the latest thing.
But what’s in that api? It’s hard to develop optimized code for the gpu of android devices because it could be anything. Qualcomm stops sending out blobs after a few versions so there’s a big transition from first party blob bin libs to third party reverse engineered ones. iOS stuff is all just metal 1,2 or 3. So even the five year old phone is getting some level of gpu support. The metal api even has a fallback layer so if you wrote for 3 and the device only has a 2 gpu it’ll split the work and there’ll be some amount of acceleration. It’s like that one version of directx that broke hardware compatibility and had to be patched.
It’s also worth addressing what you said about apple pushing the latest api. It’s true, they do. They also encourage app developers to use the old apis to target security updates at platforms that aren’t getting major versions anymore.
That system is a lot more like Debian stable than some evil empire (although I’ve met ppl who think Debian stable is the evil empire).
Apple isn’t good. They’re out to get money just like everyone else. I think of em like Lexus. The users are pieces of shit, but the cars are prime rib Toyotas which is honestly pretty nice.
Eh, you’re discounting the different development targets that the android and ios ecosystems use. From the jump almost all android developers are shooting for ancient versions of the api because no phone gets more than a few major versions. Ios developers are targeting the latest supported api so from the start it’s the latest thing.
But what’s in that api? It’s hard to develop optimized code for the gpu of android devices because it could be anything. Qualcomm stops sending out blobs after a few versions so there’s a big transition from first party blob bin libs to third party reverse engineered ones. iOS stuff is all just metal 1,2 or 3. So even the five year old phone is getting some level of gpu support. The metal api even has a fallback layer so if you wrote for 3 and the device only has a 2 gpu it’ll split the work and there’ll be some amount of acceleration. It’s like that one version of directx that broke hardware compatibility and had to be patched.
It’s also worth addressing what you said about apple pushing the latest api. It’s true, they do. They also encourage app developers to use the old apis to target security updates at platforms that aren’t getting major versions anymore.
That system is a lot more like Debian stable than some evil empire (although I’ve met ppl who think Debian stable is the evil empire).
Apple isn’t good. They’re out to get money just like everyone else. I think of em like Lexus. The users are pieces of shit, but the cars are prime rib Toyotas which is honestly pretty nice.