what's the point to have multiple densities android

Question

I was wondering, as the title mention, in an android application, what's the point to create graphics for multiple densities, while you could only have the highest density (xxxhdpi), and then the system would resize the image to the right size on the fly. It would be resource consuming if you have a lot of images, but the size of the package would be significantly smaller, and on recent phones, and by recent I mean less than 3 years, I don't think that could be an issue at all. Am I missing something here ?

You dont store images in xxxhdpi folder anyway, just icons. images go in drawable folder and at any size you wish. in all the oher dpi folders the icons go in there so you don't get a blur scaling them plus android can work out which icons to use for different screens — Tasos, Sep 28 '15 at 19:36

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 28 '15 at 19:23

Sometimes reducing a 512px icon or application graphc resource to have the same proportions on a 320px screen result in a very blurry and non defined image, specially with texts. Defining a low res Icon allow you to exactly show what you want, even not only reducing size, but cutting non relevant parts of an image.

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 28 '15 at 19:27

The OS will resize images as needed, but the result of the resizing might be sub-optimal.

In some cases this would be acceptable in others it won't. You might want to check it, and see which images do resize nicely, and which don't and decide what is the right approach for a specific scenario.

what's the point to have multiple densities android

2 Answers2