Will a density qualified drawable folder or drawable-nodpi take precedence?

Question

If I define drawables for a density qualified folder (eg drawable-hdpi), and also drawables to fall back on in drawable-nodpi, will a high density device use the -hdpi over the -nodpi?

What about if I take it a step further and also have the same setup for -land folders.

Answer 1

I'm not sure what the precedence is for nodpi, but that should never be a problem. It sounds like you are misunderstanding the nodpi qualifier. You should not use nodpi as a fallback for assets that you don't provide at the device's density bucket. The correct fallback is a folder with no density qualifier (e.g. drawable/).

If the system cannot find an asset at the device's density (e.g. it is an ldpi device and you don't have a drawable-ldpi folder), it will fall back to a folder without a density qualifier, *not the nodpi qualifier`.

The nodpi qualifier is used when you want to specify a resource that will be used for all densities and that you do not want Android to scale. Assets in the other density folders (e.g. drawable-xhdpi) will be scaled to the actual screen size. If you use the nodpi qualifier, you should not provide that asset in any other resource folders.

It is also important to note that with screen density qualifiers, Android will also prefer to use a lower density asset over an unqualified resource. If you have an xhdpi device, but you only have a drawable and a drawable-mdpi folder, Android will check for the asset in the mdpi folder before the unqualified folder.

Answer 2

drawable-nodpi will bypass scaling and drawable will use the default scaling:

mdpi = 1x

hdpi = 1.5x

xhdpi = 2x

xxhdpi = 3x

xxxhdpi = 4x

drawable-nodpi is efficient if your code will be doing its own scaling (or no scaling) and you don't want the image pre-scaled by Android.

There is also drawable-anydpi, just to make things more confusing.

drawable with no specifications will be used if an exact match on density and screen specifications does not exist. drawable-nodpi will be used after drawable.

UPDATE If you have both drawable and drawble-nodpi, the select order is either a more complex rule not documented or Android is broken. Through experimentation I confirmed that devices with screen density < xhdpi will correctly select the drawable image. Devices with screen density >= xhdpi will select the drawable-nodpi.

Selection rule: 1. Pick match to screen density, one of these:

• drawable-ldpi
• drawable-mdpi
• drawable-hdpi
• drawable-xhdpi
• drawable-xxhdpi
• drawable-xxxhdpi

2. If no match on density, then select one of these

• drawable (automatic scaling mdpi=none... xxxhdpi=4x)
• drawable-nodpi (no scaling)
• drawable-tvdpi
• drawable-anydpi (no scaling)