![\"button\"](\"http:\/\/jebware.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/button.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\nYour designer hands you a design with a PNG that looks like this (well, hopefully your designer hands you things that look nicer than this, since I have no idea what I\u2019m doing, but let\u2019s ignore that for a minute, shall we? K thx.)<\/span><\/p>\n It\u2019s just a little thing, just 300×100 dp. So you lay out the screen, run the app and everything is hunky-dory, until you look at the Memory Monitor in Android Studio and notice your app\u2019s memory usage just jumped by about 1 MB.<\/span><\/p>\n That\u2019s no good. Surely adding a simple button can\u2019t cost a megabyte of memory.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nWhat the hell just happened?<\/span><\/h3>\n
<\/a>You look at the PNG you just added, but it\u2019s only 10<\/span> KB. That can\u2019t be the problem, can it? Turns out, it is. What you\u2019re looking at in Finder is the compressed image file, but Android doesn\u2019t keep the file compressed when it loads. It renders your PNG to a <\/span>Bitmap<\/span><\/a>, which is the most un-compressed way to store an image. It\u2019s just a big matrix of pixels with a color value for each pixel. By default, Android uses the <\/span>ARGB_8888 format<\/span> which uses 4 bytes per pixel. And oh yeah, we\u2019re looking at an XXHDPI device, so our 300dp width is actually 900 pixels. That means our \u201clittle\u201d 900×300 pixel image is using 1,080,000 bytes (1.03 MB) for its Bitmap. <\/span><\/p>\n