Android Vector Drawables

Everything about Vector Assets in Android

Introduction

In the beginning, Android had fixed sizes of devices so it’s become a common practice of using assets in the form of bitmaps like PNG formats. But in the current era, Android devices are having different screen sizes and densities which is making the task of maintaining assets a bit complex. In this post, we will discuss the importance of usage of Vector Drawables, basic usage, and drawing simplified vectors.

Problem using PNG’s

The PNG format assets being used in Android applications have an intrinsic size and their quality is dependent on pixels. Each PNG asset which we use is specific to a certain density. That was the reason we provide different versions of the same image for different screen densities. Simply saying we are having multiple copies of the same asset with different sizes.

The solution is Vector assets

A normal image defines set of pixels in grid. In vectors we defines images by using points, lines and curves along with associated color information. Image scalability is one of the important…