Supporting Low Cost Android Phones | Hacker News Reader

Supporting Low Cost Android Phones

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44 pointslnanek214 comments

Public Service Announcement about Image-/Graphicsmagick ;)

Imagemagick/Graphicsmagick have a batch image manipulation tool called mogrify. For example "mogrify -format jpeg -geometry 512 -quality 75 -path other/dir/ *.png". There usually is no need for any awkward loops that use convert once per image.

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Thanks for the tip. I read the docs for mogrify just now, but it says it overwrites images and I don't see any option to change that or add a different output path. The need here is to take a source image from a folder like drawable-hdpi, and produce a new, converted image in a folder like drawable-ldpi. I guess maybe you could copy everything first, then modify it? Although that seems more clumsy than just running the find command already being used. Thanks for the help!

I wonder how easy it would be to get Android doing this automatically. It would certainly improve performance if images could be scaled once on installation of the APK instead of every time they are displayed.

What if Google Play could produce various scaled versions ahead-of-time? Then you'd have smaller downloads for smaller devices!

Since you sign your apk locally; it'd have to be integrated into the build process instead of being done in Play (else the signatures get broken).

Ah, that sucks. Allow APKs to depend on an external media archive?

That would

a) defeat the point of signing

b) require a new version of Android (which these low-end phones aren't likely to get)

It'd be far easier and more effective to tweak the build tools to crunch the images before packing up the APK in the first place.

Another advantage is that technically the Android Market will let you upload multiple APKs for a single market entry now as long as they are only compatible with different devices. So it is possible to post a different APK for each density class using compatible-screens targeting...

I've wanted a 9-patch resizer for ages now - this is great!

I wonder what the dimensions of the bitmap that caused the OutOfMemoryError were? Usually ActionBar icons are small, so it seems weird that such a small image would cause an OOME.

This brings up an interesting need: ability to easily and affordable test/simulate across the thousands of android or mobile devices. An emulator with CPU/gpu specs for each model..

I was going to suggest http://www.manymo.com/, but it seems to only allow customizing screen size and OS version — not the hardware specs.

does this do only browser emulation or actual app running?

You don't really need that many devices, and the cheap devices are cheap. For this kind of issue you can just use older devices since they automatically have lower specs. For example I use a G1 from 2008.

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