背景图像或背景颜色？

Question

If you have an activity and you need to set the background color of the activity, simply you would set the background color as

android:background="#0000FF"

or prefer to use an image as

android:background="@drawable/bgimg"

, taking performance and space requirement into consideration?

I think as using image consume space, when ever possible this approach should be avoided. Is it so, or this really does not make a significant difference? Just need to be sure from the experts.

thanks.

Answer 1

First of all this depends upon your need. If you only want a plain Red background then applying background color should be the preferred one.

As working with images may have few odds,

1. Scaling of the image for various screen sizes.
2. They definitely consume memory.
3. May not give the desired effect (blurry at times) if re-sized by the OS automatically.

On the other hand if you need something like a combination of colors then Gradient will help us. (not for the complex ones though :))

At last if you have an image type of background then drawable images will certainly be the choice.

Answer 2

color would be better, since you might have to use different image sizes to suit different screens, which in turn will increase the app size and you might not be very sure that the images are well displayed. And if you opt for higher resolution images, chances are that the app might crash with a fatal signal error just because it runs out of memory.

And @Atul O Holic's answer is complete too.

Answer 3

As little as the difference could be, the color approach is always going to be cheaper when we think in the space required, because you don't need to have a file with the image resource. Also, you can always use a native color from android using android:color/[color] . Using an image as background is only better when you can't have the same effect by just using a single color as background.

Answer 4

如果是一种纯色，则只需设置背景色（您也可以在资源中设置颜色，这样就无需继续设置它！）。

Answer 5

Totally agree with joa2fast4u, when targeting multiple devices, especially ones with low memory, any optimizations you can make to save memory/reads/writes is preferred. Also, you can specify many preset styles in your styles/themes resource files to propagate and control the entire theme of your app from the default background to the text color on your widgets.

Answer 6

1) Solid Color - Apply a background color

2) Multiple Colors - Use a Gradient

3) Anything more complex - Use images

Please note that the usage of images involves optimization of multiple screen resolutions & sizes. File size & device form factor is also an important factor to be considered here.