Android: Canvas vs OpenGL

OpenGL would be able to handle the rotations and scaling easily.

Honestly, you would probably need to learn a lot of OpenGL to do this, specifically related to the topics of:

• Geometry
• Lighting (or just disabling it)
• Picking (selecting geometry to draw on it)
• Pixel Maps
• Texture Mapping
• Mipmapping

Also, learning OpenGL for this might be overkill, and you would have to be pretty good at it to make it efficient.

Instead, I would recommend using the graphic components of a game library built on top of openGL, such as:

• Cocos2d
• libgdx
• any of the engines listed here

Well, this question was asked 6 years ago. Maybe Android 4.0 has not come up? Actually, after Android 4.0 the Canvas at android.view.View is a hardware accelerated canvas, which means it is implementd by OpenGL, so you do not need to use another way for performance.

You can see the https://github.com/ChillingVan/android-openGL-canvas/blob/master/canvasglsample/src/main/java/com/chillingvan/canvasglsample/comparePerformance/ComparePerformanceActivity.java to compare the performance of normal canvas in view with GLSurfaceView.

You are right that SurfaceView uses Canvas underneath the hood. The main difference is that SurfaceView uses another thread to do the actual drawing, which generally improves performance. It sounds like it would not help you a great deal, though.

You are correct that OpenGL can do rotations very quickly, so if you need more performance that is the way to go. You should probably use GLSurfaceView. The main drawback with using OpenGL is that it is a real pain to do text. Basically you have to (okay, don't have to, but seems to be the best option) render bitmaps of text.