I’m surprised, given the history of exploits, Google didn’t decide to start shipping the image decoders as an APEX system component in the Play Store, with the built-in ones serving as a fallback. They just might now.
The image decoders are in android.graphics (https://developer.android.com/reference/android/graphics/pac... ) & that API subset is not listed in the Android Mainline system modules that are catalogued here: https://source.android.com/docs/core/ota/modular-system
It looks as if they planned to include image decoders, but that was dropped sometime during the Android 11 development cycle, unless I’ve missed something (which is certainly possible).
Edit: the final dev release announcement for Android 11 keeps the same paragraph about the native image decoder. So maybe it is there & I’m just not finding it? https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2020/09/android11-...