Why doesn't Android Asset Studio Generate ldpi launcher icons?

Question

It's all in the title. It seems that Android Asset Studio does not generate ldpi launcher icons. The tool also seems to generate xxhdpi icons, which aren't mentioned in the Android launcher icon design guidelines

Answer 1

I think if you also navigate to the res folder in the sdk, you won't find ldpi.

Taken from FAQ of Android Holo Colors Generator, but I think it applies to all the asset studio tools

Why the low density (ldpi) is not generated ?
Android Holo Colors Generator is based upon the default holo theme (in Android source code) which does not provide any picture for low density devices. Moreover, ldpi represents less than 2% of the Android Market Share. Finally, if a device is in ldpi, it will use the mdpi pictures.

Answer 2

Android Asset Studio no longer^ targets ldpi when generating graphics due to the diminishing market share of ldpi devices. <<< this from the creator's mouth (see for yourself in the comments at https://plus.google.com/+RomanNurik/posts/dnmfXnKV75R).

You can, however, force the website to run off an older revision simply by adding the revision number to the URL's query portion, like this:

http://android-ui-utils.googlecode.com/hg/asset-studio/dist/icons-notification.html?r=9ec980e4a634

ths ?r=9ec980e4a634 being the new addition to the normal URL.

^ previous revisions DID target ldpi.

Answer 3

According to this G+ post:

The gorgeous screen on the Nexus 10 falls into the XHDPI density bucket. On tablets, Launcher uses icons from one density bucket up [0] to render them slightly larger. To ensure that your launcher icon (arguably your apps most important asset) is crisp you need to add a 144*144px icon in the drawable-xxhdpi or drawable-480dpi folder.

So this is specific to the Nexus 10, and only relevant for the launcher icon (not the screen density in general, that's still xhdpi).

Regarding the ldpi-icon issue: I guess they are simply becoming less relevant, as fewer and fewer devices are sold with a ldpi-density and downscaling from mdpi is probably more "cost-effective" than having an extra image-file in your resources folder.

Answer 4

the documentation of the android guidelines (link here) says :

Note: Android also supports low-density (LDPI) screens, but you normally don't need to create custom assets at this size because Android effectively down-scales your HDPI assets by 1/2 to match the expected size.