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.