alt Hacker NewsThe most immediate benefit is reduced memory use. Many devices are memory limited and with skyrocketing RAM prices this is becoming more problematic.
Oversubscription drops performance catastrophically, but even without running into memory limits, compression reduces bandwidth which increases performance and lowers power use. This results in better experiences and longer battery life.
But in order to be compressed, don't we have to load the image into memory first, uncompressed? I don't quite see how this could result in reduced memory usage.