Mipmap drawables for icons

Solution 1:

There are two distinct uses of mipmaps:

1. For launcher icons when building density specific APKs. Some developers build separate APKs for every density, to keep the APK size down. However some launchers (shipped with some devices, or available on the Play Store) use larger icon sizes than the standard 48dp. Launchers use getDrawableForDensity and scale down if needed, rather than up, so the icons are high quality. For example on an hdpi tablet the launcher might load the xhdpi icon. By placing your launcher icon in the mipmap-xhdpi directory, it will not be stripped the way a drawable-xhdpi directory is when building an APK for hdpi devices. If you're building a single APK for all devices, then this doesn't really matter as the launcher can access the drawable resources for the desired density.

2. The actual mipmap API from 4.3. I haven't used this and am not familiar with it. It's not used by the Android Open Source Project launchers and I'm not aware of any other launcher using.

Solution 2:

It seems Google have updated their docs since all these answers, so hopefully this will help someone else in future :) Just came across this question myself, while creating a new (new new) project.

TL;DR: drawables may be stripped out as part of dp-specific resource optimisation. Mipmaps will not be stripped.

Different home screen launcher apps on different devices show app launcher icons at various resolutions. When app resource optimization techniques remove resources for unused screen densities, launcher icons can wind up looking fuzzy because the launcher app has to upscale a lower-resolution icon for display. To avoid these display issues, apps should use the mipmap/ resource folders for launcher icons. The Android system preserves these resources regardless of density stripping, and ensures that launcher apps can pick icons with the best resolution for display.

(from http://developer.android.com/tools/projects/index.html#mipmap)

Solution 3:

How are these mipmap images different from the other familiar drawable images?

Here is my two cents in trying to explain the difference. There are two cases you deal with when working with images in Android:

1. You want to load an image for your device density and you are going to use it "as is", without changing its actual size. In this case you should work with drawables and Android will give you the best fitting image.

2. You want to load an image for your device density, but this image is going to be scaled up or down. For instance this is needed when you want to show a bigger launcher icon, or you have an animation, which increases image's size. In such cases, to ensure best image quality, you should put your image into mipmap folder. What Android will do is, it will try to pick up the image from a higher density bucket instead of scaling it up. This will increase sharpness (quality) of the image.

Thus, the rule of thumb to decide where to put your image into would be:

• Launcher icons always go into mipmap folder.
• Images, which are often scaled up (or extremely scaled down) and whose quality is critical for the app, go into mipmap folder as well.
• All other images are usual drawables.

Solution 4:

The Android implementation of mipmaps in 4.3 is exactly the technique from 1983 explained in the Wikipedia article :)

Each bitmap image of the mipmap set is a downsized duplicate of the main texture, but at a certain reduced level of detail. Although the main texture would still be used when the view is sufficient to render it in full detail, the renderer will switch to a suitable mipmap image (...) when the texture is viewed from a distance or at a small size.

Although this is described as a technique for 3D graphics (as it mentions "viewing from a distance"), it applies just as well to 2D (translated as "drawn is a smaller space", i.e. "downscaled").

For a concrete Android example, imagine you have a View with a certain background drawable (in particular, a BitmapDrawable). You now use an animation to scale it to 0.15 of its original size. Normally, this would require downscaling the background bitmap for each frame. This "extreme" downscaling, however, may produce visual artifacts.

You can, however, provide a mipmap, which means that the image is already pre-rendered for a few specific scales (let's say 1.0, 0.5, and 0.25). Whenever the animation "crosses" the 0.5 threshold, instead of continuing to downscale the original, 1.0-sized image, it will switch to the 0.5 image and downscale it, which should provide a better result. And so forth as the animation continues.

This is a bit theoretical, since it's actually done by the renderer. According to the source of the Bitmap class, it's just a hint, and the renderer may or may not honor it.

/**
 * Set a hint for the renderer responsible for drawing this bitmap
 * indicating that it should attempt to use mipmaps when this bitmap
 * is drawn scaled down.
 *
 * If you know that you are going to draw this bitmap at less than
 * 50% of its original size, you may be able to obtain a higher
 * quality by turning this property on.
 * 
 * Note that if the renderer respects this hint it might have to
 * allocate extra memory to hold the mipmap levels for this bitmap.
 *
 * This property is only a suggestion that can be ignored by the
 * renderer. It is not guaranteed to have any effect.
 *
 * @param hasMipMap indicates whether the renderer should attempt
 *                  to use mipmaps
 *
 * @see #hasMipMap()
 */
public final void setHasMipMap(boolean hasMipMap) {
    nativeSetHasMipMap(mNativeBitmap, hasMipMap);
}

I'm not quite sure why this would be especially suitable for application icons, though. Although Android on tablets, as well as some launchers (e.g. GEL), request an icon "one density higher" to show it bigger, this is supposed to be done using the regular mechanism (i.e. drawable-xxxhdpi, &c).