Apple's 64-bit transition for phones gives new opportunties to Google, MIPS

Apple's 64-bit spec uplift has been quickly picked up by Samsung,
who may have started a race to catch up; 64-bit could become the
next must-have for the mobile phone and tablet markets.

If so, Google stands to profit from a second chance to assert control
over the Android market. Of course, since Android apps run on the
Dalvik virtual machine, there's no need for them to become
64-bit, even if the base Android operating system moves to 64 bits
itself (although Google could always revise the VM specs to do that
if they wanted to, though it's probably overkill for individual apps).

However the move to a 64-bit OS below the GUI application layer gives them
the opportunity, over time, to dump support for the 32-bit version, variants
of which have been forked by Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Alibaba. Google
could simultaneously do a bit of re-architecting, transferring functionality
to the cloud, and introducing branding and copyright restrictions that
effectively negate the open-source licensing of the code corpus itself
(I think they would leave the licensing alone, apart from at most minor
tweaks, as they know they would face a firestorm of criticism from Geekdom
if they didn't).

This would have the satisfying effect of leaving such parasitical companies
to either develop and support their forked operating system on their own (thus
increasing their costs by a small but nevertheless not insignificant amount),
or to come back to the fold of the main distribution and having to cut a deal.

It would also raise the possibility of native code extensions to existing
apps perhaps not working on a 64-bit Android platform, and that must be a
plus for MIPS, the underdog Android processor. If Google attempt to go down
the pNaCl route to solving this one, rather than requiring re-compilation,
then MIPS could see a current barrier to utilisation simply evaporate away.

Bullish for Google and Imagination Technologies then.