Whatever Google has done wrong, I am nonetheless thankful for them releasing the patentless open-source VP9 and AV1 video codecs.

The world needs modern open-source video formats and Google has filled that void.

I know, OGG Theora exists, but that is two decades old and inefficient. VP9 is the counterpart that can compete with H.265.

Are there phones out there with hardware encoders/decoders for it?

@lastNick Apparently most phones since at least 2018 have a VP9 decoder. The only way to know is to look up the specification of each GPU.

GSMArena shows which GPU phones have.

Smartphones get decoders earlier than encoders. For example, the first known smartphone with a hardware-based H.265 decoder is the Galaxy Note 4. It was released in 2014! But it has no hardware-based H.265 encoder.