Android CPU ARM architectures

Question

We have a Android CPU dependent code and I would like to see how many devices used by customers are ARMv6/ARMv7, if there are still ARM v5, how many of ARMv6 have VFP, what is the Tegra or Neon percentage. Any tips where such statistics could be found?

BR STeN

Answer 1

If you want to collect such data, simply do "cat /proc/cpuinfo" and feed googleanalytics account with this data :) ( i am doing a lot of research this way ).

If you are looking for already made statistics i think that any of them is outdated :) Normal smartphone user change his handset every year or two, dependant on his carrier policy, i would forget about armv6/armv7 and neon on your place, armv6 is currently sold only in some chinese crapphones :), and neon is very nice but for example tegra 2 is incompatibile with it, the other side is that tegra2 has about 0.05 percent of market share, vfp is supported in every armv7, and arm v7 is about 95 percent of market or more. I doubt that anybody who use google play or actually is paying for apps use armv6 or antyhing older, most of google play users are using samsung galaxy for example about 20percent of overall downloads of my apps are downloaded on galaxy s2, 10 percent on nexus, and it looks like supporting all/older devices its not a good idea at all, its takes a lot of time, and paying users are usually using highend handsets.

Answer 2

In the end I don't think that this kind of data can change the way you write your application, because no matter what report says the situation is:

• the Play Store application do not check for this kind of features
• considering the previous statement, the only way to run your application correctly is to check at runtime for the support for that technology, for example you have to check if the device supports NEON, and it's your problem to do that as programmer, the Play Store doesn't check for that.
• if you are not using a particular instrunctions set you don't have this problem so this question should be erased in 3, 2, 1 ... !

Another consideration is the fact that ARM is an architecture that can have multiple forms and with that i mean the fact that if you pick 2 commercial product like the Tegra 2 and OMAP 4430, they are both ARMv7 devices but the Tegra 2 doesn't support NEON while the entire OMAP 4 family support this kind of registry, so not even the label about the instructions set can really tell you about the real potential of the device itself.

In the end all that it's worth to know is that the Play Store tells you nothing about this, knowing about the most used platforms won't really help, and in the end you always have to do the same task and the check for this kind of features is up to you.