Are Android LDPI assets/icons still needed?

Question

It's mid-2013. Is it safe to assume that ldpi assets do not need to be packaged in the APK, or are there still devices on the market >= Android 2.1 that have such a low screen density?

This Android Design page says that Android will just scale HDPI resources down, though perhaps for performance reasons LDPI resources are still better for LDPI screens.

Answer 1

This question provoked some though from me; I had stopped bothering to deal with ldpi assets because I remember seeing a miniscule representation representation for that screen density in the dashboards (something around 2%). However upon checking from @CommonsWare's answer it is now 10%.

Current screen size/density breakdown:

I did some digging (via the Wayback Machine) and found that at the time, I was correct:

So, it would seem that there has been an influx of ldpi devices as of late and while they were potentially irrelevant, they are now much less so. Maybe we can't assume that as time goes on, screen density is guaranteed to go up.

However, I don't think I would bother to make specific assets for lower density devices. It isn't too much of a stretch to all the platform to scale for them; scaling down is always more amenable than scaling up. Plus, the SDK tools seem to have abandoned them a bit as well, the tool for generating the ic_launcher.png images no longer populates the /drawable-ldpi folder, so I wouldn't bother anymore either...

Answer 2

or are there still devices on the market >= Android 2.1 that have such a low screen density?

At the present time, 10.3% of Android devices actively hitting the Play Store are -ldpi.

Since 99.9% of Android devices are ">= Android 2.1", it's safe to assume that most of those 10.3% are also running Android 2.1+.