SVG Vs PNG on Android

android svg android-drawable android-5.0-lollipop
sravanalakshmi.sunkara picture sravanalakshmi.sunkara · Nov 3, 2014 · Viewed 25.5k times · Source

Which is the best way of dealing with images in Android. Recently in Android Lollipop We had given support for SVG(Scalable Vector Graphics) concept. Which is the best way of working with images to support all resolutions PNG(placing images in particular drawable resources) or SVG(Small file sizes that compress well, Scales to any size without losing clarity (except very tiny)).

Answer

alanv picture alanv · Nov 3, 2014

Lollipop (API 21) does not support SVG. It support a subset of SVG path drawing functionality through the VectorDrawable class. This class is not currently supported by appcompat, so it is only available on API 21.

You will still need PNG images for older platforms, so the ideal workflow is to have vector-based source images that you export to PNG for various DPI buckets and convert to VectorDrawable format for API 21 devices using a project like svg2android.

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