Is it necessary to fill in the appxmanifest with all tile resolution images?

Question

The appxmanifest has entries for developers to fill in four different tile resolution images for each kind of tile (small, medium, wide, large), the different resolutions are: scale-180, scale-140, scale-100, scale-80.

From what I can tell if the developer fills in the largest resolution image (scale-180) the system will automatically scale it down when needed on lower resolution displays, thus it works everywhere. So do most developers really even need to bother filling in all the different tile resolution images? Seems like it will just bloat the size of the application for nothing.

My question about filling in the different resolution images not about whether I need to have the small, medium, wide and large images.

Answer 1

It's certainly not necessary, but it is recommended. Scaling images down (or up) can cause visual artifacts that may not be present in the original image. It may be the case that a particular image looks fine in all scaling plateaus, but others may not (this is especially true for bitmap images). Again, it is up to your discretion, but worth visual inspection at each scaling level.

MSDN has a scaling guidelines document that could be helpful.

Answer 2

See the reasons for filling wide tile and small tiles are for different reason. 1 - wide tile

if your app has a live tile notification feature then u need to implement it. But not mandatory. Just a criteria of metro app.

2 - small tile. This is the by default tile of the application so you should go ahead and add it. If theres no live tile concept then you can fill only small tile. The square one.

3 - then there is a place to put in the image that will be used as a tile icon when user searches for it.

and then there is store logo.

all these are by default set to one cross marked logo. Which u generally see. None of them are mandatory but finally while uploading to the store they will become requirement specific and mandatory. Otherwise you will get a long list of improvements to be done on your app from microsoft. :) . Have faced that .