If you have quite a skillful graphic designer on your team, then in general, this limitation could be bypassed by converting shadows into simple gradients from full color to completely transparent, etc. You can see at the beginning of the video what happens to the shadows - they just disappear. any effects, blending, even the simplest shadows, blur. This format doesn’t support styling attributes, i.e.

The vector format that’s used by Android is not the popular SVG/EPS/AI format - it’s the XML, and that means, it has very limited usage.This means, that if your app has to support older Android versions as well - you will still have to provide raster icons for them. The vector format in Android OS was introduced in version 21, you can use vector images as application icons in the launcher only in versions 26 and higher.But it has some drawbacks, let’s talk about them, maybe in your case a vector icon is not an option. Especially if the application is not large, and PNG icons, (if not made correctly) consume almost a quarter of the total app size. Getting rid of bitmaps in an entire application is a dream of many optimizers. The guide is also available in the Czech and Russian languages.

However, it does have some limitations, and I will describe them here, also as a complete description of the whole process of its preparation, including a video of it. This means that you do not need to create a bitmap icon for each screen resolution at all, but use one/two vector files for all possible resolutions! Since raster icons are quite bulky you can save a lot of kilobytes in the size of the application. Digging through Android’s documentation, I’ve noticed that not only adaptive icons were added to the SDK for version 26, but also the ability to completely forget about raster app icons for the launcher on the newest versions of Android.

Android studio logo vector