[deaddodo]

I don't know if it's over the top. ARM isn't too complex to convert. There's some register mangling that needs to be managed for SIMD, data struct alignment checks and overbounding behavior that needs to be accounted for; but it's all relatively (keyword on relatively, it's still a lot of work) simple and orthogonal.

I would assume it's provided because in Xiaomi's primary two markets (India and China), there's a ton of 32-bit apps that their users need and won't upgrade phones (a lot more common in those markets) if they can't keep them. Google Play is also less commonly used in those markets.

[bonzini]

https://www.amanieusystems.com/technology explains how the emulator works. Large parts of the translation are done ahead of time before the app is run first.

The paper https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3140587.3062371 is also related to the emulator that they are using.

[user_7832]

While India is certainly a big market, to the best of my knowledge it’s nowhere close to China as far as using legacy apps or non-play store distribution. (Also expensive phones unsurprisingly don’t sell very well in India but that’s not very unusual.)