In appearance, Google’s Pixel 7 and 7 Pro look like any other high-end Android phone: plethora of photo sensors, Oled screen, generous amount of RAM… But on closer inspection, Google mobiles differ from the rest of the market thanks to a particular technical feature: these are the first Android mobiles compatible exclusively with 64-bit apps.
The benefits of 64-bit
In a blog post published on October 28, Google discusses the reasons behind this technical choice. “This configuration removes support for 32-bit code from the operating system, which reduces memory usage, improves performance, and enhances security“, explains the American firm by way of introduction.
As we already explained in 2013, the transition from a 32-bit architecture to a 64-bit architecture mainly allows an application to use more than 4 GB of RAM. Overall, 64-bit processors are able to process more information in parallel, thanks to increased address space (the amount of “power” a program can access). The move to 64-bit has been done for a long time on our laptops and the operation is similar on our smartphones.
Until then, most recent Android mobiles were compatible with 32 and 64-bit apps. The Pixel 7s are the first to drop support for 32-bit apps. “64-bit applications run faster because they have access to additional registers and instructions that are not available to 32-bit applications. Additionally, newer processors provide performance up to 25% superior when running 64-bit code“, explains Google. Removing the code relating to 32-bit apps also frees up 150 MB of RAM (which the system used even when no app was running). Finally, it is also an advantage in terms of security. since increasing the address space allows better control of data flow and avoids buffer overflow attacks.
An invisible transition
Concretely, this decision should not change much in your daily use since Google requires that Play Store applications are compatible with 64-bit systems since 2019. Unless you are dragging an old file of installations not updated for three years, you shouldn’t have any problems. The small performance boost should not be very visible on a daily basis either, the Pixel 7 being already perfectly optimized for current uses.
However, Google continues to host 32-bit applications on the Play Store, especially for mobiles running Android Go, the “lite” version of the mobile OS. On the high end, however, the future is 64-bit.