[krschultz]

Android supports a sub-set of SVG in its VectorDrawable and AnimatedVectorDrawable classes. There is also tooling to convert SVG into VectorDrawables.

It is definitely a partial subset and creating VectorDrawables from any sort of design program is a giant PITA. The best strategy is making an SVG and then going through the XML by hand and turning it into a drawable (ugly I know).

Clearly this is the future direction of Android, but as of today it is still only half implemented.

As for why we didn't have SVG from day 1 on Android, I'm going to guess that is all a performance optimization. It's hard to overstate just how slow & weak early smart phones (iPhone & Android) were relative to today. We've expanded the scope of the apps to fill the available resources (as software engineers always do), but now there is enough head room to handle it all.