Drawables for different screen densities

Issue

Is it a good idea to just put a high resolution image resource in the XXHDPI or XHDPI and let android do the up scaling or down scaling according to the device on which the app runs and save time putting different size image in different folders i.e. a image for each folder LDPI,MDPI,HDPI,XHDPI,XXHDPI,XXXHDPI... means why it is required to put different images for each density when we can just use a high resoltion image for the same and let android do the rest, does it make any real difference in performance , UI or anyway ?

Solution

You could do that, but the downscaling is not perfect. You are going to get strange artifacts the smaller and less dense the device gets. You will get better looking apps if you design smaller assets for screen sizes that are smaller and less dense. Also photoshop or other image processing applications do a far, far better job at reducing images than the Android platform could do.

The other aspect is performance. Icons may not take a lot of time to scale individually, but there are a lot of them. Phones with smaller densities also typically are older, weaker and/or have less memory. They will feel the impact far more than newer, more powerful phones. You also run the risk of out of memory exceptions for larger images you may have like wallpapers.

Answered By - DeeV