Only use XHDPI drawables in Android app?

android drawable screen-resolution
Emil picture Emil · May 14, 2011 · Viewed 14.2k times · Source

If you're planning to support LDPI, MDPI, HPDI, and perhaps XHDPI in the near future, is it ok to only include XHDPI drawables in the project and let the devices scale them to their desired resolution?

I've tested to resize the drawables into MDPI and HDPI in Photoshop and then compared the result with XHDPI drawables only resized by Android, and I can't see any difference at all. Is it bad design to take this shortcut? It would be nice to not have to resize each and every drawable into 3 different resolutions.

Planning to use target SDK is 2.1 or 2.2.

BR Emil

Answer

Will Kru picture Will Kru · May 14, 2011

I guess that's a good way to go. The only downside I can think of is the resource overhead on small scale devices and possible artifacts because of the downscaling. Actually at this year's Google IO Chris Pruett recommended embedding only high resolution assets and let opengl handle the scaling.

Related questions

How to support all the different resolutions of android products

All the different resolutions of the different Android products are driving me nuts. My first android app that I wrote was designed so it supported the three commonly used resolutions: 240x320 (LDPI), 320x480 (MDPI) and 480x800 (HDPI). The 480x854 didn't …

Read More
Android: drawable resolutions

I've been through this post (and others) as well as through the documentation about supporting different screen resolutions in Android, but I couldn't find a clear answer to a (simple) question: Is it ok to just use "res/drawable" for …

Read More
How set background drawable programmatically in Android

To set Background: RelativeLayout layout =(RelativeLayout)findViewById(R.id.background); layout.setBackgroundResource(R.drawable.ready); Is the best way to do it?

Read More