[android] Android: Background Image Size (in Pixel) which Support All Devices

My understanding is that if you use a View object (as supposed to eg. android:windowBackground) Android will automatically scale your image to the correct size. The problem is that too much scaling can result in artifacts (both during up and down scaling) and blurring. Due to various resolutions and aspects ratios on the market, it's impossible to create "perfect" fits for every screen, but you can do your best to make sure only a little bit of scaling has to be done, and thus mitigate the unwanted side effects. So what I would do is:

• Keep to the 3:4:6:8:12:16 scaling ratio between the six generalized densities (ldpi, mdpi, hdpi, etc).
• You should not include xxxhdpi elements for your UI elements, this resolution is meant for upscaling launcher icons only (so mipmap folder only) ... You should not use the xxxhdpi qualifier for UI elements other than the launcher icon. ... although eg. on the Samsung edge 7 calling getDisplayMetrics().density returns 4 (xxxhdpi), so perhaps this info is outdated.

• Then look at the new phone models on the market, and find the representative ones. Assumming the new google pixel is a good representation of an android phone: It has a 1080 x 1920 resolution at 441 dpi, and a screen size of 4.4 x 2.5 inches. Then from the the android developer docs:

  • ldpi (low) ~120dpi
  • mdpi (medium) ~160dpi
  • hdpi (high) ~240dpi
  • xhdpi (extra-high) ~320dpi
  • xxhdpi (extra-extra-high) ~480dpi
  • xxxhdpi (extra-extra-extra-high) ~640dpi

  This corresponds to an xxhdpi screen. From here I could scale these 1080 x 1920 down by the (3:4:6:8:12) ratios above.

• I could also acknowledge that downsampling is generally an easy way to scale and thus I might want slightly oversized bitmaps bundled in my apk (Note: higher memory consumption). Once more assuming that the width and height of the pixel screen is represetative, I would scale up the 1080x1920 by a factor of 480/441, leaving my maximum resolution background image at approx. 1200x2100, which should then be scaled by the 3:4:6:8:12.
• Remember, you only need to provide density-specific drawables for bitmap files (.png, .jpg, or .gif) and Nine-Patch files (.9.png). If you use XML files to define drawable resources (eg. shapes), just put one copy in the default drawable directory.
• If you ever have to accomodate really large or odd aspect ratios, create specific folders for these as well, using the flags for this, eg. sw, long, large, etc.
• And no need to draw the background twice. Therefore set a style with <item name="android:windowBackground">@null</item>