Mobile Operating Systems with Built-In AVIF Support

The AV1 Image File Format (AVIF) has quickly emerged as an efficient alternative to traditional image formats like JPEG and WebP, offering superior compression ratios and higher dynamic range. Modern mobile operating systems have integrated native, system-level decoders for AVIF, enabling third-party apps, system galleries, and web browsers to render these files without requiring proprietary third-party libraries. Both Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS/iPadOS provide native framework integration for AVIF decoding and display.

Android

Google added system-level support for AVIF starting with Android 12 (API level 31).

On Android 12 and newer versions, the platform includes a native AVIF decoder integrated directly into the media framework. This enables the operating system's standard image-loading pipelines (such as BitmapFactory and ImageDecoder) to parse and display AVIF files across system services and applications. System components like Google Photos and the Chrome browser can render AVIF natively. While playback and viewing are supported across all compliant Android 12+ devices, hardware-accelerated decoding depends on whether the device's chipset includes a dedicated AV1 hardware decoder; devices lacking hardware support fall back on software decoding via libraries such as libgav1.

Apple iOS and iPadOS

Apple introduced native, system-wide support for AVIF in iOS 16 and iPadOS 16.

In the Apple ecosystem, AVIF support is integrated at the Core Graphics and Image I/O framework levels. This system integration allows native rendering across the entire operating system, including the Photos app, Files app, Safari, Quick Look, and Messages. Any third-party application relying on standard iOS imaging APIs can display both still AVIF images and animated AVIF sequences without extra configuration. Similar to Android, rendering performance utilizes hardware decoding where AV1 silicon is available (such as the A17 Pro chip and later) and relies on efficient software decoding via Apple's integrated frameworks on older compatible hardware.