SVG support on Android

Question

Does Android support SVG? any example?

Answer 1

The most complete answer is this:

• The Android 2.x default browser does not natively support SVG.
• The Android 3+ default browsers DO support SVG.

To add SVG support to 2.x versions of the platform, you have two basic choices:

1. Install a more capable browser (like Firefox or Opera Mobile - both support SVG)
2. Use a JavaScript polyfill that can parse SVG and render it to an HTML5 canvas

The first option is okay if you're just trying to make SVG work for personal uses or a limited (controllable) set of users. It's not a great option if you want to use SVG while targeting a large, uncontrolled user base.

In the later case, you want to use a polyfill. There are many JavaScript libraries available today that can prase SVG and render to a canvas. Two examples are:

• canvg
• fabric.js

Using a polyfill, you can render your SVG in a canavs on all versions of Android 2.x.

For a more complete example of this approach, you can refer to this blog post that discusses the use of the canvg polyfill for making Kendo UI DataViz charts (SVG-based) work on Android 2.x. Hope that helps!

Answer 2

There is a new open-source library that supports loading and drawing SVG Basic 1.1 files: https://github.com/pents90/svg-android. Performance is good as the actual drawing is handled natively by an android.graphics.Picture object.