Navigation Drawer Menu on Android 2.X - Small Screens

Question

I have recently coded an application and included a DrawerLayout with the Navigation Drawer pattern. This application must support ldpi/small devices and android version 2.1+ for market share reasons.

One user made an observation about the Drawer Menu icon looking 'cut' and the app being hard to navigate because of this. I guess this is expected, considering that all mayor apps (Twitter, Instagram, Gmail, etc) haven't updated the app for this kind of devices. Though, they are using this pattern for newer/bigger devices/platforms.

Considering that the DrawerLayout has been included in the support library, i would expect apps to start backporting it to 2.X sooner or later. Maybe big players haven't done it because Google officially deprecated LDPI ldpi/small devices are rare nowadays and even unsupported for some community tools, but what would be the right thing to do in order for the app to be successful in this matter? Is there any guideline to follow on this topic? If you have to support ldpi/small and 2.X, would you go with a drawer navigation menu? why?

Thanks for your comments.

[Edit]

Went too far, for some reasons i thought Google actually deprecated LDPI/small, but it was just some community tools/libs that i've seen around that actually did it. Even the ADT template doesn't generate the drawables for LDPI/small.

Answer 1

Considering that the DrawerLayout has been included in the support library, i would expect apps to start backporting it to 2.X sooner or later

I wouldn't. A redesign that adds in a nav drawer is a fairly substantial redesign, and I would expect most developers doing such a redesign to ignore Android 2.x entirely. At most, they might worry about Android 2.3, and even then only for a short while.

Maybe big players haven't done it because Google officially deprecated LDPI

I am not aware that "Google officially deprecated LDPI".

If you have to support ldpi and 2.X, would you go with a drawer navigation menu?

Personally, no, because ~90% of -ldpi devices are -small devices, and I suspect that you will find that you have to make some substantial UI compromises for -small screens. Even an action bar may be too much "chrome" for such screens.

But i guess the question is more oriented to whether the patter is known and used in older devices/platforms, and whether we should expect those users to know how to use it.

Probably not. Overall, I would expect them to be less than completely familiar with the action bar, because fewer apps on -small devices would use it, due to limited screen space. I would expect there to be few apps who use an action bar and a nav drawer on -small devices.

That being said, the navigation drawer design documentation covers discoverability. Getting some of that to work on a -small screen may be dicey, but it is at least worth investigating.