6.10. Alternative Resources

Android supports multiple competing sets of resources. For example, you could have multiple versions of a strings.xml file, status.xml layout, or background.png image. You might want multiple versions of the same resource so that the best version can be used under different circumstances. We touched on this in Section 6.9.1.

Imagine that your application is used in another country with a different language. In that case, you could provide a strings.xml version specifically for that language. Or imagine that a user runs your application on a different device, with a different screen that has more pixels. In that case, you’d want versions of your images specifically for this screen’s pixel density. Similarly, users might simply rotate the device from portrait to landscape mode. Our application will redraw properly, but there are further enhancements we could make to the layout of the UI given the orientation of the screen.