While Vulkan is technically more powerful, OpenGL ES 3.1 is often the preferred choice for Android developers for several reasons:
It is the most efficient way to handle high-resolution textures on modern Android GPUs.
Released by the Khronos Group, OpenGL ES 3.1 was designed to bring the capabilities of desktop-class OpenGL 4.x to mobile devices. While newer APIs like Vulkan exist, version 3.1 remains the "industry standard" for high-compatibility, high-performance Android development. The Headliner: Compute Shaders
Calculating the movement of thousands of particles or cloth physics.
Group objects by material and shader to avoid expensive context switches.
Almost every Android device sold in the last 7–8 years supports GLES 3.1. If you want your game to run on a wide range of hardware without maintaining two different codebases, 3.1 is the target.
To run OpenGL ES 3.1, an Android device typically needs to be running . From a hardware perspective, this was ushered in by the "Android Extension Pack" (AEP), which guaranteed support for: Tessellation shaders (for high-detail terrain). Geometry shaders.
ASTC texture compression (which significantly reduces memory footprint without losing quality).
Using the GPU to decide which objects are visible before they ever hit the rendering pipeline. 2. Top Features for High-End Android Graphics
1 Compute Shader, or should we look at for specific Android versions?