Develop Reference

Layout Issue on Small Screens

I'm working on a Android App. Layout working fine on every device except where device screen size 480x800 & less.
How can create separate layouts by only targeting that screen size or less?
I'm already tried layout-hdpi, layout-small-hdpi & layout-normal-hdpi since phone like Nexus S, Nexus One are in hdpi category. But when I create separate layouts like layout-hdpi those layouts are affecting phone with bigger screen like Pixel, Pixel2, Nexus 5 etc.
Thanks in Advance

Phones (as opposed to tablets) tend to come in about three size groups (as far as Android resources are concerned): those with smallest width of 320dp, those with 360dp, and those with 410dp. The resources framework gives you a way to target any device larger than a certain width, so the correct technique is to put layouts for small screens on the default folder, and layouts for larger screens in one of the qualified folders.
Since it sounds like your layouts currently work well for anything 360dp or larger, you can make two layout directories:
res/
layout/
layout-sw360dp/
Put the special layouts for the small screens inside res/layout/ and put the “normal” layouts in the other directory.

Its not easy but you can also specify layouts based on the smallest width and you you supply the numbers. You can get more detailed and separate layouts that way however in my experience you will still run into that problem from time to time. In my current project using this method I have specific folders for W360 and W400 to deal with smaller devices for one specific screen.
https://developer.android.com/guide/practices/screens_support.html#DeclaringTabletLayouts

What you are looking for, is a layout bucket with the smallest width qualifier.
A layout with a set smallest width will be active, unless the smaller of the both dimensions (width or height) is lower than a certain value you can choose.
So, when a device has a smallest width below some value X it will use the default layout, when the value is X or more it will use the defined smallest width layout.
To create such a layout file in Android Studio, you wanna right-click your layout directory, click on new -> Layout Resource File and select the Smallest Screen Width qualifier from the list of available qualifiers. Now you need to specify your smallest width, which in your case should be slightly above 480dp. Give it the same name as your current layout file. Place your code for devices with a smallest width above 480p here. Now change the code in your other layout file, without the smallest width qualifier, to support smaller screens.
For further reference take a look at the official Android Developer page.

5.2'' and 5.0'' screen support on android devices

I have been struggling with this problem about a week and can not figure out how to make it work. I have some views on a screen. And one values\dimens.xml(sw320dp-xxhdpi) resource file. Also I have nexus 5.2 1080*1920 420dpi and nexus 5.0 1080*1920 xxhdpi. The layout appears differently on both screens. How to make it display the same on each device?
What resource file should I add (if it is any)?
How to add for example values\dimens.xml(1080*1920 420dpi)?

I think your layout is simply built as poorly scaling. Unless you have some very specific use case, you need to make sure your layout fills the area it is provided with regardless.
As for the resource folder, if you want to make sure the same layout file is used on large screens, it is enough to put it in the folder layout-sw360dp. If you have xxhdpi devices with the resolution 1080x1920, Android will select the same file for both since the smallest side will be exactly 1080 / 3 = 360 density-independent pixels.

How to make it display the same on each device?
In general it's impossible for all Android devices. I think best solution - using VectorDrawable or SVG format and scale vectors for each device.

How to make layout compatible with different android devices in android studio?

I am designing an app with a .jpeg background and with text views on particular places on the screen. I designed this for my nexus 6 and used dp for the widths and heights of text views and margin-left and margin-top. What my understanding of dp is that it changes with every device according to screen size and density. So it should work on different phones according to the value of dp for them.
But this is not the case. When I run that app on a different phone (nexus 5) the layout is all messed up. I tried using the different resources and qualifiers for different screens (large, small, normal). But the problem still prevails. The app considers both nexus 6 and nexus 5 as large screens. How do i fix this?

this is not the best solution i guess.
i guess your layout is just on the layout folder. i don't know if the first device you tested the layout is large or small but what you should do is create another folder named layout-sw600dp. this folder is used by tablets. the folder layout is used my phones and smaller devices. you could also create the layout-land and layout-sw600dp-land folders for the landscape orientation.
dp do change depending on the device but if your layout gets messed up then i guess the layout called by that device doesn't fit its resolution. i guess dp becomes smaller if the device is bigger and vice versa.

In Android, image sizing while supporting multiple screen sizes

In my android app, I want to support multiple screen sizes. I realize that for Android "large" means a lot of the current phone screens at 480 x 800 pixels as well as a 7" tablet like the Nexus 7 which has 800 x 1280 pixels. But I'd like to create 2 separate layouts for those two display sizes. I've found that rather than using res/layout-large, using res/layout-h800dp gives me greater control of which size screen uses what layout. (I'm using a portrait orientation, hence h800dp) The problem I'm having is this: sometimes the h800dp layout uses the images in the drawable-mdpi folder, and sometimes it uses the images in the drawable-hdpi folder. I'm using the same syntax in the xml to call the images: `android:src="#drawable/image", but in one activity it looks in the mdpi drawable folder, and in the next activity, it looks in the ldpi drawable folder. Is there any way to get the h800dp layouts to always look in the ldpi folder?

This link explains nearly everything regarding screen properties (DPI, physical size, resolution, etc.)
What you may be able to do is specify folders like layout-large-hdpi, layout-large-mdpi, and layout-large-ldpi.
Experiment with blending these types together in folder names.

Android screen resoulution problem

I'm writing a game for Android and can now test it on a second device, the Nexus 1. The game uses fix pixel-values, just using bigger cutouts of the background for high-res devices. So I thought there would be no problems. Somehow, however, the nexus 1 is making a specific image bigger than it should be (261*66 instead of 174*44). The picture itself as a resource is 174*44, so it's being stretched. Why? What can I do against it?
Edit:
Spritesheet = BitmapFactory.decodeResource(res,
R.drawable.bird_spritesheet);
Is the used code.
Edit 2:
Is there no way to tell the software to just use the size the picture is? I don't want to bloat my software by adding multiple pictures (/drawable-hdpi/ answer).
The pictures are supposed to be smaller on bigger screens.

what drawables folder to you have the picture in? If you put a copy of it in drawables-hdpi I think it will show up real size. It is really better to set things up in such as way that the final size in pixels it ends up is unimportant. Using pixels values is going to ensure that your app looks wrong on at least some of the screen sizes out there.

Because Android runs on multiple screen sizes and you use device independent pixels (DIPs), images get scaled to ensure they look the same on all devices. To avoid this, you can provide alternative resources for high density screens (in your case) and for low density screens.
More info about screens here