Nine-patch versus Vector graphics

Question

I am learning about Android UI and am unclear why people use nine-patch, when you could use vector graphics, because those are scalable without any pixel degradation. I am a beginner in Android, so I hope I am not missing anything here, but it seems like it would be easier to build vector graphics and use those. You would not need the special editor to build them.

Can anyone explain the advantages to using nine-patch over vector? (Don't just explain advantages of nine-patch, as that is already done on StackO., but rather the advantages that vector does not have). Because it seems like Android recommends nine-patch. Thanks.

Answer 1

i hate 9patches. i am quite attentive when doing my artwork. i don't even use photoshop. i go with illustrator. i do everything right when exporting my artwork, i used to do my 9 patches with insane zoom on, maybe check afther that in photoshop for misplaced pixels... ** sad trumpet ** when put on a view, if i used some subtle round corners like 6px or 10px and a stroke everything looks awful at mdpi.

So I solved my problems by marrying the two. I wrote my own 9patch which uses vectors. :)

Everything looks like it's been touched by baby Jesus. Perfect corners, strokes and, best of all, you can use one asset for all the screen sizes, densities while, of course, no more transparent borders, wicked errors because 9patch won't stretch inward, so on and so forth.

I use vectors for icons too. While there sometimes are issues with various effects, these are minimal and easily avoided if you do some reading on how to avoid them.

Best of luck to all you guys!

This is a very basic example.

You can do whatever strikes your fancy. Because of the performance impact of svg's on an app, when first run [or when the user changes appearance options, i like to save the newly generated bitmaps as pngs, if possible.

You don't get any more "best of both worlds" than this.