Are Android Views Backed By Opengl?

Do native Android views (View class and everything that extends it, i.e. TextView, ImageView, etc...), use OpenGL under the hood? If not, are there any advantages to using OpenGL

Solution 1:

Do native Android views (View class and everything that extends it, i.e. TextView, ImageView, etc...), use OpenGL under the hood?

Basically yes, OpenGL ES is the API used by the display hardware system to draw things on the screen. More recently Vulkan is gaining support as an alternate API and would be using a project like ANGLE to provide support for OpenGL ES.

As the Android Open Source Project already has a document on Graphics system in Android you should look there for more detail.

Are there any advantages to using OpenGL to the average Android Developer as opposed to using the regular views for custom UI components?

If you want complete control over what you are rendering which is the use case for games, 3D modeling, or a UI framework like Flutter then OpenGL ES or Vulkan would be appropriate.

Otherwise for regular Android apps writing custom UI View(s) which uses the Android UI Framework would be appropriate as that would take advantage of all of the work that is described in the Google IO presentation: Drawn out: how Android renders (Google I/O '18)