As we are developing our OCR solution to work better, faster and more accurate, we use the newest technology that is available to get the best out of it. However, new technologies are sometimes not compatible with the older ones and we need to make compromise to support both old devices and get the most of the new ones.

One such piece of technology is ARM NEON SIMD extension. This extension is always available on 64-bit ARM processors, but not on 32-bit ARM processors. Until version 5.0 of PhotoPay SDK and until versions 2.0 of BlinkID and BlinkOCR we build the 32-bit binaries without support for NEON, thus supporting devices without NEON, at the cost of slower performance on devices with NEON. Since version 5.0 of PhotoPay and versions 2.0 of BlinkID and BlinkOCR, we dropped support for devices that do not support NEON extension. This enables even faster performance for most of modern devices, at the cost of not supporting devices without NEON (last device without NEON has been built back in 2012).

PhotoMath for Android never had support for devices without NEON and so far we received only 5 reports (out of more than 5 million users) of attempt to run PhotoMath on devices without NEON support - and all those devices were rooted with custom ROM. Basically, today there is no device today that runs on CPU without NEON support and runs a recent version of Android, so it is logical to remove support for such devices if this can result in much better performance on all other devices.

Besides removing support for ARMv7 devices without NEON extensions, in PhotoPay 5.0 we also removed support for ARMv6 devices. Those devices have only a single core and do not support floating point instructions which are used heavily inside OCR process. Such devices are even older than ARMv7 devices without NEON support and are not able to run recent Android versions. Removing support for ARMv6 made our PhotoPay SDK smaller by roughly 3.5MB - this will also reflect the final size of your app integrating PhotoPay SDK.