What are the performance implications of drawable downscaling?

Question

Is there a way of working out what, if any, performance implications are associated with allowing the Android OS to downscale images from the hdpi bucket for a mdpi device?

To give a use case - I'm shipping a fairly large, fairly complex application and to save space I've proposed to strip out mdpi assets and allow the OS to downscale from the hdpi drawables folder. The worry is that this may have an impact on performance, which is noteworthy as the app is already quite resource hungry and mdpi devices aren't necessarily known for being high spec devices.

Answer 1

Have a look at this nice article: http://cyrilmottier.com/2014/08/26/putting-your-apks-on-diet/ from Cyril Mottier.

The main point behind my hdpi/xhdpi/xxhdpi rule is simple. First, I cover more than 80% of my users. Secondly xxxhdpi exists just to make Android future-proof but the future is not now (even if it’s coming very quickly…). Finally I actually don’t care about the crappy/low-res densities such as mdpi or ldpi. No matter how hard I work on these densities, the result will look as horrible as letting Android scaling down the hdpi variant.

Although it doesn't directly answer your question, this might give you a bit of confidence that you're doing it right.