Skip to main content

Android status bar expects icons of size 25x25dp while guidelines recommend 32x32dp. Who is wrong?



According to android icon design guidelines ( here , see table #1), developer needs to provide status bar icons of next sizes:







Status Bar 24 x 24 px (LDPI) 32 x 32 px (MDPI) 48 x 48 px (HDPI)







While my measurements show that status bar always has 25 dp in height and expects icons of 25x25dp. This translates to these sizes:







Status Bar 19 x 19 px (LDPI) 25 x 25 px (MDPI) 38 x 38 px (HDPI)







Here is how I get those size:







25dp * 0.75 = 18.75 => 19px (LDPI)

25dp * 1 = 25 => 25px (MDPI)

25dp * 1.5 = 37.5 => 38px (HDPI)







I have confirmed calculated sizes on several Android phones and on emulators.





The question basically is: why guidelines use sizes different from what is really used by status bar?





P.S. I actually need to break guidelines due to precise pixel control requirements. And I just was confused by this state of affairs. So explanation of why this the way it is would really help me.



Source: Tips4all

Comments

  1. It just seems to be an error. (Note that as of 2010-12-04, they've also crossed their references to figures 4 and 5 on that page.)

    As Lex points out, they have the correct number further down, in the "Status bar icon" section.

    They also dictate a 2-pixel "safeframe" on all sides at 25x25 which the shape of your icon must fit within, though it seems that it is okay to have some aliasing-related stuff stick out, but only on the sides, for this type of icon. (Meaning that you really want to aim for 21x21 at that size.)

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Slow Android emulator

I have a 2.67 GHz Celeron processor, 1.21 GB of RAM on a x86 Windows XP Professional machine. My understanding is that the Android emulator should start fairly quickly on such a machine, but for me it does not. I have followed all instructions in setting up the IDE, SDKs, JDKs and such and have had some success in staring the emulator quickly but is very particulary. How can I, if possible, fix this problem?