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A data point: "OpenGL ES is still supported on Android, but is no longer under active feature development. Vulkan offers the following advantages over OpenGL ES" "Vulkan is the preferred Android interface to the GPU. Android 15 and up includes ANGLE as an optional layer for running OpenGL ES on top of Vulkan."

https://developer.android.com/games/develop/vulkan/overview

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Android smartphones are notorious in having low-quality Vulkan drivers full of bugs and spec violations... (I'm looking at you Qualcomm!)

A data point: SDL3-GPU maintainers announced that they will not give a shit about Android support, since there's just too many devices that haven't properly implemented the Vulkan spec. (https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/issues/12652#issuecomment-...)

Another data point: the current maintainer of the renderer portion of the Godot engine suffering through all the bug reports from Android devices (https://github.com/godotengine/godot/issues?q=is%3Aissue%20s...)

Is the GL driver any better? (It sounds like it is?) It's Direct3D on windows all over again :-(

Nope, as Google has moved to use Angle on top of Vulkan.

Ironically, the Vulkan discord always complains about the bad support of Vulkan on mobile devices, and how OpenGL ES is still better supported.

Google has moved Android to having only Vulkan, with OpenGL ES on top via Angle, exactly to force OEMs to actually care about Vulkan support.

Until now it has been pretty much only usable on Google and Samsung phones.

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