Is the AOSP AAC encoder/decoder of high quality?

[Xori]

I've heard that AAC is worse on Android than it is on iOS, due to its poor implementation.

I checked the encoders/decoders that Xiaomi has opted to use on her device, and have noticed that half of them were from AOSP (e.g. c2.android.xxx.encoder), and the rest were from an OEM, such as MediaTek.

Meanwhile, Google is using their own encoders/decoders, and the AAC situation is fine there (On Pixel devices). No complaints from people.

The question that was created from this is whether the poor quality of AAC is due to OEMs opting to use their proprietary encoders/decoders, as opposed to those provided by Google.

And so, we return to the original question: Are Google-provided AAC encoders/decoders actually good?

 

[Davdi]

Why not just use VLC it's inbuilt AAC codec gives really good quality playback.

 

[mikedt]

I've heard that AAC is worse on Android than it is on iOS, due to its poor implementation.

I checked the encoders/decoders that Xiaomi has opted to use on her device, and have noticed that half of them were from AOSP (e.g. c2.android.xxx.encoder), and the rest were from an OEM, such as MediaTek.

Meanwhile, Google is using their own encoders/decoders, and the AAC situation is fine there (On Pixel devices). No complaints from people.

The question that was created from this is whether the poor quality of AAC is due to OEMs opting to use their proprietary encoders/decoders, as opposed to those provided by Google.

And so, we return to the original question: Are Google-provided AAC encoders/decoders actually good?

Where did you hear that? Because that's something I've not heard of.

AFAiK Android(AOSP) uses libAAC. Which is used in many open source OSs and software. Also some apps use their own codecs, rather than the stock ones in the devices, e.g. VLC and Foobar2000.