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Asked: 2026-05-23T15:24:08+00:00

I am building Javascript application for mobile browsers (not wrapped-as-native app). I noticed that

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I am building Javascript application for mobile browsers (not wrapped-as-native app).

I noticed that Android (tested 2.3 emulator and Galaxy S device) reduces the quality of loaded images if the image dimensions exceed certain threshold (width above 1400 px or so). This make it impossible to load big bitmap images (2000 x 2000 px) without the quality going unusable.

I tested this by

  • Loading one big image and drawing it on the – I got pixel garbage out. If I draw grid lines using lineTo() on they have perfect quality, so the bad must be in the image pixel data

  • Slicing the big image to 100 x 100 slices and drawing them to a canvas – this is the only method I found resulting no quality reduction. However, slicing is cumbersome, adds extra step to preprocess images and page loading times suffers

  • I tested tring to load image with new Image() object, tag and CSS background: everything suffers from the reduced quality, so I suspect the probelm is the image loader itself

  • I also tried everything with CSS image-rendering https://developer.mozilla.org/En/CSS/Image-rendering – no luck

  • Viewport tag seems to have no effect to the image loading – the data is already garbage when you try to touch the loaded pixel data. I tried all possible values suggested in Android’s SDK documentation http://developer.android.com/reference/android/webkit/WebView.html

Tested also Firefox mobile, desktop browsers, iOS: everything is good there.

So, what is going on – Android WebView simply can’t load big images?

(smiley of hung Android robot here)

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Android unconditionally resamples images and reduces quality if a certain threshold of memory usage is exceeded.
    https://android.googlesource.com/platform/external/webkit/+/android-3.2.4_r1/WebCore/platform/graphics/android/ImageSourceAndroid.cpp

    There is no way to access the original image data in intact.

    I posted a question regarding this to android-developers Google Group and kindly asking to maybe provide some kind of flag to opt-out from this behavior.

    Meanwhile, if you are considering developing HTML5 web apps and you might use big images, you simply need to preprocess them on the server-side by slicing, send in smaller images to the device and then reconstuct the original image using or putting many tags inside a container element.

    Another option would be load image “manually” by writing a PNG decoder which directly loads the image to , bypassing ImageSourceAndroid class.

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