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Aww man, I worked on the chromecast SoC. It was a... difficult product. If there was a more perfect example of a product being killed by penny pinching, I can't think of one. It just didn't have enough flash for anything but a super cut down android. We had to drop multilib - the SoC and everything supported 64bit, just there wasn't enough space for the libraries. And the cheapest, bargin-basement flash as well - causing so many to be bricked trying to update. Plus 1gb ram, when even entry level phones were shipping with 2gb - just a couple of 4k framebuffers and the video decode reference frames meant there was pretty much nothing left for the apps themselves. So 1080p was it's limit despite having a capable video decoder and output.

And for ages afterwards they would use it as a reference device for google TV and testing for play store certification - just as they were pushing 64-bit only as a valid app path. So many things were only missing from the google tv play store for years afterwards because they just wouldn't function on those things.



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