Google is a leading member of the 'Aliance for Open Media,' a group of companies working to create a successor to VP8/VP9 (both used in WebM video), called AV1. AV1 is designed to be more compressed than VP9 while still retaining good video quality. Google announced today that Android Q will include native support for AV1, paving the way for more widespread use.

Facebook tried out AV1 with hundreds of popular videos, and found that the format had "30% better compression than VP9, and achieves gains of 50.3%, 46.2% and 34.0%, compared to x264 main profile, x264 high profile and libvpx-vp9, respectively." In other words, AV1 could mean that Netflix binges won't use quite as much cellular data.

It will be a while before Android Q becomes widespread enough for applications to start using AV1, but the video codec is already supported in Chrome.

On a related topic, Android Q will also add support for the Opus audio codec, which was first released in 2012. Opus is another open standard, frequently used for WebRTC-based phone calls and as an alternative to MP3.

Source: Android Developers