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0 pointskllrnohj6y ago0 comments

> Android is a great example of this. I don't know how things are done now, but for its first few years, they had screen size classifiers; ldpi (low dpi), mdpi, hdpi, etc.

This example doesn't really work. Those buckets have always been primarily for image asset selection, not UI declaration/layout. It's comparable to the 1x, 2x, 3x that exists in iOS land.

Nothing has ever actually replaced those. In any UI toolkit. Vector assets finally took a chunk out of their usage, but there's still plenty of assets that are not vectors.

The density support in Android largely remains the gold standard. The only UI toolkit that actually achieved robust density independence. There's plenty broken about Android's UI toolkit, just this isn't one of them.

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013a6y ago

Yeah, that was a misprint on my part; I should have referred to them as density classifiers, which is what they are. My brain got jumbled because my broader point came later on, in how there was a time years ago when many apps were elying on them as a signal for screen size, to the point where I saw apps place layout files in a specific mdpi or xxhdpi folder.

Of course, today, I'm sure the Android landscape is more mature and different; I have less context about the thinking around a modern android app today.

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