I don't see any comparison here on the impact of decompressing? Is this going to hit a processor harder than JPG/PNG/BPG/et al will, and thus be a hit to people on mobile devices?
Decompression speed is important. (And more important than compression speed.) But the bottleneck on mobile devices is increasingly falling on the mobile network. CPU performance per watt is falling dramatically where mobile bandwidth per watt is staying relatively static. If this continues eventually we'll get to the point where the power usage (e.g. for loading and displaying a web page) is completely dominated by data transfer, and more and more computationally expensive compression becomes the best way to save overall power by trading cheap cpu cycles for expensive bandwidth.
Processor and storage are much cheaper than network bandwidth this year.
The most relevant tradeoff calculation now would probably be bandwidth versus battery power consumption.
The FLIF image decoding library might want to be battery-aware, such that it can automatically scale back the power consumption at lower battery charge levels, in a user-configurable fashion. Or perhaps it caches a fully decompressed or partially decompressed file to storage, so that it only does the battery-devouring steps once.
