What is the risk of missing graphics in an Android application for all screens (ldpi, mdpi, hdpi)?

Question

Android

As you know, in an Android application for each screen density, it is recommended
to have a separate image file (ldpi, mdpi, hdpi, xhdpi)
developer.android.com/guide/topics/resources/provi...

In practice, it is enough to have graphics in the xhdpi folder to everything was displayed as it should on all screens.
No problems with rendering, speed of work were noticed on any phone.
Even on the most ancient versions of Android and small screens.
That is, they perfectly scale high-resolution images (xhdpi) and display as needed.

It is clear that there are recommendations, specifications, lint and so on.
And I still try to follow these requirements according to the schedule.
But it takes a decent amount of time and I want to understand the causes and effects.
Since there are always other more real problems on which it would be worth asking for your attention.

Does anyone have real experience where a lack of lower resolution resources has led to some notable problems?

Answer 1

This is probably due to the size of the allocated memory for an application with a certain screen size. Using graphics on ldpi from xhdpi is fraught with catching OutOfMemory at 16mb per application. And the load on the system to compress xhdpi images with a ratio of 2.75. It’s good if you only have icons and icons, and some of them have blurry backgrounds and parallaxes, although 9-patch saves here too.

Answer 2

Does anyone have real experience where a lack of lower resolution resources has led to some notable problems?

My first android application that never came out was an application with cards (playing cards). The design was only for the iPhone, I threw all the pictures either in hdpi, or in xhdpi, I don’t remember. And so on ldpi phone constantly there were OutOfMemory and terrible brakes of animation and initialization of views. Then I just converted everything using imagemagick under mdpi and ldpi and everything worked quite quickly. OutOfMemory got smaller, but they remained, well, that's another story about bitmap.recycle();

Answer 3

And if you discard OutOfMemory altogether?
We are not talking about applications that abuse graphics.
The standard application is 200-400kb of graphics in xhdpi resolution.
Shrinking icons 2 times will not make the weather worse.