Android and supporting multiple screens layouts

Question

I\'m finishing off an Android app, all that remains is to adapt the UI layouts and graphics for multiple devices. I need particular elements placed in particular positions o

Answer 1

I think you're on the road to hell.

Android runs on an enormous variety of devices, more every week, and many formats don't exist yet but will introduce new variables. So even if you succeed, one new device with a slightly different screen size, and your app will fail.

It's a mistake to design for Android using specific screen resolutions, and is similar to the issues you'd find if you forced all pages to be the exact same size on the web, it rarely works well (e.g. even a tidy fixed-width site will fail miserably on mobile devices).

Android has been designed to support all this variation, but if you try to get pixel-perfect absolute-positioned rendering on every screen size you are swimming against the tide. It is likely to be very painful, very time consuming and expensive, and likely to ultimately fail. Even if you succeed, how on earth will you test it on all these screen variants? It sounds like testing hell too.

I STRONGLY recommend you accept you cannot do everything as exactly as you need to, and instead look at how to use ways of rendering objects fluidly, relative to each other, so the app looks good in all the different variations, using the different layouts for each group of resolutions to improve the experience on different size screens.