These Android apps may stop working in 2022

ARM held the DevSummit Developer Summit. At the meeting, ARM previewed the next two generations of Cortex CPU cores, codenamed Matterhorn and Makalu. According to ARM, the peak performance of Makalu in 2022 is expected to be 30% higher than that of the Cortex-A78 launched this year.

At the same time, ARM also introduced to developers the new progress and supporting support of its instruction set in the fields of AI (artificial intelligence), ML (machine learning), security, etc.

It should be noted that ARM has confirmed that starting from 2022, its Cortex large-core CPU will cancel support for 32-bit architecture, but the small-core CPU chips will continue to support 32-bit for the time being.

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In fact, 64-bit architecture has become the mainstream choice of major technology giants. Take ARM as an example. ARM launched the Armv8 architecture as early as 2011, which supported 64-bit architecture applications for the first time.

At the same time, Apple has completely abandoned 32-bit architecture applications on its own iOS, macOS and other operating platforms and implemented 64-bit; Google also clearly required developers in 2019 to provide 64-bit applications in addition to 32-bit versions before August 1, 2019, and announced that after August 1, 2021, Google Play will stop providing non-64-bit versions of applications on 64-bit devices.

In short, whether it is iOS or Android, developers are currently required to develop based on 64 bits.

The addition of ARM has undoubtedly sounded the death knell for 32-bit applications on mobile devices. This is because the current iOS devices or Android devices are all secondary developed based on the ARM CPU instruction set architecture, and most of them use the big.LITTLE architecture design of ARM's large-core CPU, which means that most application development in the future will be based on the 64-bit architecture.

So why do the giants abandon 32-bit architecture applications and migrate to 64-bit applications? This is mainly because the 64-bit CPU architecture can provide a faster and richer user experience.

Generally speaking, a 64-bit CPU is designed to operate 64-bit integer data. It can process larger data blocks more efficiently than 32-bit devices, which means faster running speed, lower latency data throughput, and quicker user response.

In addition to a better experience, the difficulty of task processing faced by smartphones at this stage is also increasing. In addition to 3D games and 4K displays, AI, ML, AR/VR, etc. also have a strong demand for higher computing power, and the room for improvement of the 32-bit instruction set is increasingly limited, and it cannot bring the best user experience.

From this point of view, 64-bit architecture has become an inevitable trend in application development. Thanks to the closed system characteristics of Apple, iOS developers have basically completed the 64-bit architecture update of applications; however, due to the fragmented nature of Android, there are still a large number of Android applications that have not been recompiled or rebuilt. In other words, some 32-bit applications will suddenly stop working on new phones released in 2022.