I am confused about the density of the Android phones. I want to know the screen resolution of high density, medium density, and low density Android phones.
I also want to know the density of HTC Google nexus and Droid. Can any one help me with this?
To add to Andrei's answer.
To help out with your burden you could always use: http://members.ping.de/~sven/dpi.html to calculate the dpi.
And wikipedia lists a lot of different devices so it's only for you to go through them and calculate. Of course if it's not stated somewhere else like sven's calculator.
But first read through http://developer.android.com/guide/practices/screens_support.html
You should read http://developer.android.com/guide/practices/screens_support.html
It will answer to many your questions.
Google Nexus One and Motorola Droid have hdpi (in practice, all phones, not tablets, with 480x800 and higher resolutions, have hdpi, 320x480 phones - mdpi)
Related
I'm about to adjust all drawables for an Android app for XXHDPI devices (like sony xperia Z and samsung s4). After thorough reading on Google's documentation, blogs, and SO, I'm confused as to the graphics I'm about to produce.
My concerns are the following:
Google states that I shouldn't worry about this density as it scales up XHDPI graphics - In the same manner, (before XXHDPI devices) why the production of XHDPI graphics was a necessity and it didn't scale up HDPI graphics?
Sony reminds developers not to exclude XXHDPI screens without clarifying if this concerns making adjustments to graphics - Do I have to redesign all graphic elements for XXHDPI?
Based on (2), Sony Xperia Z Ultra has 342dpi density but it is categorized as an XXHDPI device. - If I produce the graphics for an XXHDPI, which is twice the size of an HDPI density, the graphics will scale down by almost 1/3 to match Sony's density and this is undesirable. Why doesn't Xperia Z use the XHDPI drawables? What if I have a pattern and I can't afford any scaling since I'll lose the detail of the pixel-perfect pattern?
Are XXHDPI resources REALLY necessary?
I hope somebody can answer all the questions above.
EDIT
Below are the results of slightly scaling a graphic to adjust to various densities
- xhdpi image (1:1) no scaling
- xhdpi scaled up by 10%
- xhdpi scaled down by 10%
The detail loss is obvious at 2nd and 3rd image.
Unless you actually need your graphics to be "pixel perfect", scaling up from XHDPI will probably be fine for almost all cases. Pixels are so small the user won't be able to tell the difference. Do you actually have an XXHDPI device you can see your graphics on? You might have to provide XXHDPI resources for some drawables, just like you sometimes have to provide MDPI drawables when the HDPI ones don't scale down well.
"do not exclude" in this context means explicitly from the manifest. Some developers target densities in their manifest and that will affect the app not showing in the Play store, this is unrelated to actual graphics.
From that same page, it actually says that the density of that device is 440 dpi? - "One of the awesome features you’ll find in the recently announced Sony Xperia Z is its 5” screen, which boasts a display density of 440 dpi,"
XXHDPI resources are essential for stuff like icons on modern devices. Google will change their story and start to recommend them when they release their own XXHDPI Nexus device.
Think about it this way: xxhdpi devices are pretty much the STANDARD Android devices. Little chance Samsung & HTC are going to roll everything back to XHDPI just because Google can't keep up.
1) Android scales the drawables selecting the drawable that will produce the best result https://stackoverflow.com/a/14004691/936414
2) The post only asks you to include xxhdpi screen support in manifest. All XXHDPI devices take resources from XHDPI and scale them to fit accordingly. So no need of separate resources in XXHDPI folder
3) No need to include resources for XXHDPI.
What simulator resolution i should keep when developing application for Samsung galaxy s2 and galaxy s3 ?
What i found that samsung galaxy s2 has 480x800 resolution and s3 has 1280x720 resolution so what i have understood up till now that I should ask my graphics designer to provide me hdpi graphics that contain 480x800 background images and to implement same background image in galaxy s3 mobile, I will use image of size 1280x720 and put in xhdpi folder so that it can work on s3.
The background image is something which covers whole available area for mobile app. so am i right ??
You will need to create several emulators or get various devices.
There are some pretty important ones, so generally you need to make sure you have:
ldpi, mdpi, hdpi, xhdpi
and
small, medium, large, xlarge
Some people choose to exclude certain sizes (like small and ldpi) but htat's up to you,
if you go with some or all of the following, it should be a good start:
480x320 (SE Mini 10), 480x800 (GS2, Desire, etc), 1280x720 (GS3, Galaxy Nexus etc), 1280x800 (Note, Xoom, various other tablets)
HTC ChaCha (because it's landscape default)
You need to make sure you create resources in the relevant folders for each density, usually, I tend to ignore ldpi and just put resources in:
mdpi,hdpi and xhdpi (mdpi will be scaled down for ldpi devices,
automatically)
You may also need to create various portrait and landscape layouts in different sizes.
Reading this page provides most of the necessary information:
http://developer.android.com/guide/practices/screens_support.html
This page also contains important information regarding size distribution and popularity that is constantly up to date:
Android Stats
One thing that Android does for you is that it manages resolution. If you use the proper size formats (dp, sp, etc), your layout will scale to almost all resolutions. If you place images in the proper drawable folders (hdpi, ldpi, mdpi, etc), the OS will also swap those out as necessary.
Also, the emulator should handle resolutions for specific devices, if I recall correctly.
Desing lazout in smart way! Usualy it means don't put to mutch content in one layout.
Make sure that evrything looks good on smallest size and bigest size. It is better to treat tablets separetly. Read how providing alternative resources works, you can build sepereate layouts for each screen size.
Check if the hardware is available on that device before using it. hasSystemFeature() can be used for checking.
This is might seem to be a sort of silly question to ask but I would like to know while testing our apps what is the best resolution to be used (HVGA/WVGA/QVGA?etc)?
I ask this because I want the layout and the performance of the device to be consistent across most screen sizes.
There is a regularly updated diagram with the screen sizes and densitys available at the android developers site:
Source
This doesn't tell you an exact resolution, but seperates all phones into 4 sizes (small, normal, large, xlarge) and densities. This should give you a hint at least.
The biggest chunk is obviously Normal/hdpi, I guess that should be a lot of 3.7" HDPI displays with a 480x800 resolution (or at least close to this res). Like the Nexus One or HTC Desire (there are sure some newer ones, but I only keep an eye on the market when I'm searching for a phone to buy).
You can use all resolution to test your application, because some phones have QVGA resolution, some HVGA or WVGA resolution. Tablets have others resolutions.
More informations : http://developer.android.com/guide/practices/screens_support.html
If you use the dp unit for the sizes of your screen elements, then you shouldn't need to worry (as much) as this is a relative size, based on the pixel density of the screen.
I'm testing my app at Galaxy Tab and Motorola XOOM emulator skins, and I can't understand, why the drawables are taken from the wrong folders. I have drawable-xhdpi folder, where I store big size pictures. However, Tab takes drawables from drawable-hdpi, and XOOM uses the drawable-mdpi folder. So, how do I manage my resources? Thanks in advance.
In addition, it feels like view sizes defined in sp are not ported properly. I have some views which need to be 80sp x 80sp, on phones with mdpi and hdpi screens they look right, but on tablets they look too small. Why can this be?
However, Tab takes drawables from drawable-hdpi, and XOOM uses the drawable-mdpi folder. So, how do I manage my resources?
There is no single "Galaxy Tab" device, so I have no idea which one you are referring to there. The XOOM is an -mdpi device. I would expect that the Galaxy Tab 10.1 would be -mdpi as well. However, in the end, device manufacturers will choose values that they feel deliver the best results for existing applications.
GalaxyTab 7" use "-large-hdpi"; XOOM 10.1" use "-xlarge-mdpi".
check this post for details:
GalaxyTab, Motorola Xoom Screen Desity and Size
I have test with multiple screen resolutions and find out Android use the following qualifier for different screen resolutions:
240x320: -ldpi
320x480: -mdpi
480x800: -hdpi
GalaxyTab7.1 inches: -large
GalaxyTab10.1 inches: -xlarge
Hope this information is useful for you.
Galaxy tab (the old one, running Android 2.x) is indeed not xhdpi. I had success by using the "large" qualifier to identify tablets. Else you can always use an API qualifier such as v11 for Honeycomb only resources.
Rather than using the dpi qualifiers you can use screen size qualifiers instead, theres info here on exactly what tags you can use when selecting which resources to use,
http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/resources/providing-resources.html
It's important to understand the difference between dpi and screen size, dpi tends to be high on phones, like a samsung galaxy s2, but on the big 10 inch tablets it tends to be low(which makes sense if you think about it, the phones squeeze more pixels into a smaller space).
When I design Android apps, I use HVGA resolution in the emulator. I saw (on YouTube and other videocasts) that some developer use higher resolution like WVGA or similar.
Which resolution is best for designing nowadays Android apps? Why?
Why restrict yourself to one resolution? You are perfectly able to customize the design for all screen resolutions. See this page in the developer docs: Supporting Multiple Screens
It tells you how to support multiple screen sizes and how to test them.
The best resolution to design for is the resolution that the user is using. That sounds obvious, but as there are a plethora of Android devices, there are also a plethora of supported screen resolutions. What you need to do is make sure you design your app to support a multitude of resolutions so that it looks great on all devices, not just one. #Tchami points out how to get started.
All of them, simultaneously, because there's nothing more annoying than getting 95% of the way through an app and discovering your boss is testing it on an HTC Desire, her boss is testing it on a Galaxy Tab, and they both want it to look right for them.
For your design time, Tackle multiple resolutions first, landscape/portrait second. Build a ton of emulators with a ton of different screen sizes, including tablets. Those are my priorities. You can always make someone use something that works in the orientation they dont want, but you cant make them use something that doesnt work in either orientation.
The other comments here are all correct that it should work at all resolutions. If you want to know which ones you should focus on and make pixel perfect, use the Android Device Dashboard, which provides a breakdown of all the screen sizes and densities of the last week worth of Market users. This will let you know which screen types are especially worth targeting (normal hdpi and normal mdpi dominate at the moment)
http://developer.android.com/resources/dashboard/screens.html
I always design 768px X 1280px canvas size, this is about xHdpi resolution and you should resize all elements in canvas to 4 sizes or 5 which are mdpi,hdpi,xhdpi(baseline),xxhdpi,xxxhdpi(optional) then you have a device independent design for your app.
mdpi = 160dp = %50 (resize)
hdpi = 240 dp = %75 (resize)
xhdpi = 320 dp = %100 (baseline)
xxhdpi = 480 dp = %150 (resize)
xxxhdpi = 640 dp = %200 (resize)