Question

If you always have to draw the same rectangle, it is faster to do it with a static bitmap or with canvas.drawRect()?

For this example, the are four layered rectangles. So a boarder with a fill color, and then a boarder between a middle color and the fill color.

So four paint.setColor() commands and four canvas.drawRect commands or one canvas.drawBitmap().

Answer 1

I strongly recommend drawRect().

Bitmaps take up a huge chunk of memory, and can lead to Out Of Memory Exceptions if not used correctly.

Written by android:

Bitmaps take up a lot of memory, especially for rich images like photographs. For example, the camera on the Galaxy Nexus takes photos up to 2592×1936 pixels (5 megapixels). If the bitmap configuration used is ARGB_8888 (the default from the Android 2.3 onward) then loading this image into memory takes about 19MB of memory (2592*1936*4 bytes), immediately exhausting the per-app limit on some devices.

To prevent headache, and unexpected crashes. Use drawRect();

If you are doing these 4 draws on a regular basis for different objects, consider writing a method that does all 4 for you. So you are not causing massive repetition.

For example:

public void DrawMyRect(Canvas canvas, int x, int y)
{
   canvas.drawRect(x, y ,x + 15, y + 40, paint);
   // Draw its line etc etc..
 }

Alternatively, if you do go for drawing bitmap, as it does have advantages:

See this epic Link by Android, on how to properly use Bitmaps