AV1 decode works well enough even on quite old devices, and it has more favorable quality and size, individually or when considering both. I prefer it to h264 (or vp9 or even h265) at this point, and there isn't a particular need for hardware decode to benefit from it. On Youtube (probably the biggest and most accessible source of av1 video), when comparing size and quality on different codecs (h264/vp9/av1), av1 is either gonna have much smaller size while keeping some level of quality, or have better quality at similar size, or even have both be better.

I had an iphone 13 and av1 playback was pretty bad, could technically be done with some apps but never worked well. New iphone it works quite well.

Firesticks are quite popular. I'd like to see what percentage in the wild actually does decode AV1 in hardware, and without stuttering or buffering problems. Even my newer devices sometimes choke on h265.

[dead]