I was having a hard time figuring out how to phrase this. Sorry if this is a noob question, I'm new to responsive design and mobile web design in general.
My phone (Galaxy s10e) will render my webpage as if it's 360 pixels wide, with all elements positioned appropriately based on this width. I have several image tags on the site that are the same width. I was using src images that are 360px wide, and this looks fine on desktop because it is actually rendering my images at 360px, but on mobile the images alone appear to be rendering at a much higher resolution, causing it to look terrible due to upscaling.
If someone could explain to me what is happening here it would really help, since I can't find information on this specific behavior. Some questions I have:
Thank you for your time. Let me know if you have any other questions. I'm using ReactJS to develop the site.
OK so in a nutshell pixels are relative sizes. One pixel is not literally one pixel on your phone.
What happens is PPI kicks in and basically zooms in to make things readable.
Because if you actually tried to view 360px on a phone with that pixel density you'd see nothing really.
So lets look at some phone specs:
6.1 INCH
5.90 x 2.77 x 0.31 INCH
Resolution 1440 x 3040 PX ~ 550 PIXELS PER INCH
Viewport 360 x 760 PX 138 PIXELS PER INCH
Now the viewport is what you actually see on screen. in this case it give you a pixel ratio of like 4. So that means your phone has a resolution 4 times that of it's viewport.
so for a web app where a div is set to 200px wide it will display 200px as you'd expect it based on the viewport but this div is actually 800px wide relative to your phones resolution.
Now pictures don't need this limitation. Whats the point in a high res display if your pictures only display 200px with a pixel density one fourth of your screens capability.
So a picture lives in a dual reality on your phone. It has a box size which is the size of the image relative to your viewport but the image itself inside the box lives within your resolution relative to your devices total screen pixels.
So when you have and image that's 200px in the viewport its display resolution is actually 800px. So when you put a picture that's only 200px and have it on a screen that does viewport scaling which nowadays is pretty much everything you're effectively stretching that image to four times its actual size. or what ever the screen pixel density ratio to viewport is. AKA it looks like crap.
And to answer your needs on this I'm just going to direct you here to MOZ who will go over the whys and how's as well as show you what to do to combat this.
Combating element position is pretty easy you just use :
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1" />
In your <head>,