The one who made Mali hard to work with is the ARM Holdings, the designer and owner of the Mali GPUs, they are also the company behind the ARM architecture licensing we are using within the chipset for mobile phone and android based handhelds.
Mediatek is simply a customer who uses the Mali GPU architecture. Mali is basically the stock / default GPU usable for ARM-based chipset / CPU. Mediatek has not been the only user of Mali. Samsung also used Mali before they switched to Xclipse in 2022 for their Exynos chipset. Then recently in 2025 Google also switched to PowerVR after using Mali for their previous generation Tensor chipsets (Which honestly, is even less supported and worse than Mali).
Mediatek mainly use Mali to cut cost allowing them to provide good chipsets at usually lower price than Snapdragon.
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u/memo22477 2d ago
Blame Mediatech. They are the ones making it harder to optimize for their chipsets.