What screen sizes does (and will) Android honeycomb support?
When I try anything other than WXGA on the emulators, even the system apps and home-screen look odd. Should I assume that Honeycomb does not, and will not, support anything other than tablets?
What screen sizes does (and will) Android honeycomb support?
"Will" is impossible to answer, as nobody can predict the future with any accuracy.
"Does" is impossible to answer in the way you appear to be expecting (resolution).
Should I assume that Honeycomb does not, and will not, support anything other than tablets?
Since Google has indicated this repeatedly in 2011, I think that it is a safe assumption.
Note that Android 3.2 added support for tablets in the 7" range in addition to the 10" range. Resolutions are up to the device manufacturer. That being said, one likely resolution for 7" tablets is 1024x600.
The Android emulator only really supports WXGA for Android 3.x at this time, AFAIK -- at least, that's the only supported emulator skin.
Also note that Honeycomb concepts are likely to appear in Ice Cream Sandwich, which is rumored to be released later this year.
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I made an application under Android emulator provided worked perfectly on all types of dispositives (small, normal, large, xlarge) (-ldpi,-mdpi, -hdpi,-xhdpi). But the last few days I saw that in some phones with the latest versions of android (these phones consist with a lower bar like tablets) did not look properly.
So my question is: what kind of phones have or can upgrade to these versions of android? (small-HDPI, normal-HDPI, normal-xhdpi???)
Thank you!
Theoretically, nothing stops a manufacturer from making an ldpi device capable of running ICS or JB. However, in practice, most devices with ldpi and even mdpi to some extent do not have good enough processors in both CPU and GPU departments to be able to run the newer version of Android.
Till date, the lowest I've seen an ICS device go screenwise is a normal-mdpi display. However, I do not know the details of every device in existence, and there could be lower devices as well.
You should design your app keeping in mind all device configs, at most excluding only ldpi and small displays.
My app has different layouts and styles for xlarge screens. This is important because on phones it is only used in portrait and on tablets it is only used in landscape.
A user contacted me a few days ago because since I published the update with the tablets layouts he can't see some of the objects in my main activity (prior to this update I only had portrait layouts - also on tablets). He uses a 7 inch tablet running Android 2.3.3 and for some odd reason it is using the layouts and styles from the xlarge directories even thew it should use the default layouts and styles.
I tested it on the emulator and had the same problem. I then changed only the android version to 3.1 (did not change width, height and density) and it worked as expected - the default layouts were used.
I don't want to use version qualifiers (layout-xlarge-v13) because then users with old android versions that have an xlarge screen will get the wrong layouts. For android 3.2 and up I could use sw720dp but older versions will not use this so problem remains.
I am able to tell at run time that the device is not large enough for the xlarge layouts but what can I do in that situation? Is there a way to make it use the default resources?
Android doesn't give its blessing to any 7-inch tablets running Gingerbread or below since Honeycomb was released. This means your device must be either old, or non-CTS compliant. You are looking at an extremely small pool of devices that are: API level 7-10 (roughly), 7-10 inches in size, that live outside the main Android ecosystem.
If you want to support such devices, I would recommend that you make layout-large-v7 and layout-large-v11. Assume that these nonstandard tablets will select the first one, and design for low- or medium-density 1024x600-pixel displays.
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which android tablet i should buy for my development?
Do the android OS version matter when doing development for android tablet.
I want that my app covers most used android versions. I took a look at Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, it has android 3.1 version. So can i upgrade it to android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich)
Well, if you can find one with Ice Cream Sandwich, that's going to cover the most bases in terms of current versions of Android. You may want to take a look at XDA Developers or Cyanogenmod Forums to see if the tablet you are considering is well covered by the modding community as well. I suggest this because if the manufacturer of your new tablet decides it doesn't want to upgrade to Jelly Bean, or whatever, in the future, the modding community may be your best best.
So those are my two points - try to find an ICS based device, so you don't need to upgrade right away - and so that you can test your app on live hardware for the newest SDK version; and try to make sure the device you are buying is pretty well covered by the modding community.
I can caution you to avoid Toshiba's tablets, as they have abysmal customer support and do not talk about their planned updates for their devices for months on end. I've not heard great things about the ICS update for Asus Transformers either, even though their Honeycomb is incredible. To be honest, I love ICS alpha 2 on my HP Touchpad.
I would get the Samsung Galaxy 10" tablet. This is the most common size of tablets so you can expect your applications to look good on most tablets. If you go with an 8.9 inch or 7 inch tablet your applications may not scale perfectly to the 10 inch tablets. You can always create more layouts to fit each dimension, but I usually try and target the 10 inch tablets first since they are most popular.
"I want that my app covers most used android versions"
Android 2.3 has the biggest portion of devices in the wild. You can see a break down of the version distribution here:
http://developer.android.com/resources/dashboard/platform-versions.html
If you're going to target newer releases (and use things like fragments or loaders), you might want to consider using the Compatibility Library to ensure you cover 2.3 and older.
I'd probably +1 for Galaxy 10" tablet - They seem pretty popular, and good modding scene support. I have Xoom upgraded with ICS, and it works pretty well for development. Better then the emulator, that's for sure ;)
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Closed 10 years ago.
Possible Duplicate:
What hardware devices do you test your Android apps on?
I'm porting my iPhone app over to Android, planning on releasing it in the Google and Amazon AppStores. I'm planning on targeting OS versions 2.2 and 2.3, as they have the highest market share.
But, what devices have the highest market share? I want to make sure I test on the "common" devices, and so I'm looking for resources / recommendations about which devices to include in my testing regimen.
It depends the target country as the market share of a device varies.
I would recommend covering some of the following attributes
Devices with screens : ldpi, mdpi and hdpi
Devices with screen sizes : small screen (3 inches), normal screen ( 4 inches ) large screen ; 7 inches or more
Refer to the platform versions link for more details
http://developer.android.com/resources/dashboard/platform-versions.html
There are no dominating phone models in the android world. My app supports 2.2+ (API 8). The top three phones models among its users are Galaxy S2 7%, EVO 7% and Galaxy S 2.7% with a long tail of 'other models'. Welcome to the free world. ;-)
From compatability view point, it is safer, if you can live with it, not to use targetSdkVersion and to have minSdkVersion == target SDK version (as you set in eclipse).
Also, make sure to test in portrait and landscape (unless if your app is limited to a single app) including transitions mid activity.
AFAIK, As long as your app working on target OS, device shouldn't be an issue. Anyway, you may try on samsung galaxy, HTC etc., By the way you may need to make sure it is working for different resolutions.
I'm developing an Android app that absolutely needs to support Android 2.1+ devices, including tablets and phones.
The tricky part is I want to be able to provide roughly the same user experience on Android 2.x tablets as on bone fide Honeycomb tablets. I'm planning on using the Compatibility package so that Fragment support is always available, but...
The problem I've got at the moment is I've bought a Hannstab for testing, and discovered that it reports to apps that it has a "large" screen, despite actually being 10.1 inches. This would technically make it "xlarge", but of course that category was not included in Android 2.2 (which it runs), hence it's "large". I originally intended to just use resource qualifiers and treat all xlarge devices as tablets, and everything else as phones but now I realise I can't do that.
Would it be so bad to treat all xlarge and large screened devices as tablets? This would include Dell Streaks and other 5 to 7 inch screen devices as I understand it.
Is there a better alternative? I haven't really got my head around fragments properly yet so a fragments-based solution might be obvious to someone who has.
I've noticed that typically, apps I install on my Hannspad use their normal phone UI, with the exception of Evernote which uses a specific tablet interface - I wish I knew how they'd done that.
The new "Smallest Width" resource qualifier introduced in Android 3.2 would solve this problem by doing away with the generalised screen size buckets altogether. Presumably I could copy this approach by writing code to work out the screen width in dp and then adding fragments to the activity as appropriate. Is that wise? I'd rather avoid that kind of work if it's going to be a pain.
Cheers
Would it be so bad to treat all xlarge and large screened devices as tablets?
If your question really is "is it OK to use the same layouts, etc. for -large and -xlarge devices", that certainly can work. It's certainly where I would start.
Bear in mind that device manufacturers really are the ones who determine what is -large or not. It would not surprise me to find some manufacturers creating 5" devices to categorize them as -normal, because they feel that -normal apps tend to work better on their devices than do -large apps.
I've noticed that typically, apps I install on my Hannspad use their normal phone UI, with the exception of Evernote which uses a specific tablet interface - I wish I knew how they'd done that.
Probably using -large/-xlarge resources. I don't know if they are using fragments or not.
In terms of screen sizes, fragments really are for cases where the -large/-xlarge UIs are basically a bunch of -small/-normal sized UIs snapped together like LEGO(R) blocks. In Evernote's case, their -large/-xlarge UI does not fit that pattern, so they may or may not have used fragments.
Fragments offer some other advantages for memory management and configuration changes (e.g., screen rotation), so you might consider using fragments even if you are not sharing fragments between major groups of screen sizes.
Is that wise?
If possible, I would hold off on making that decision until Ice Cream Sandwich ships and we start seeing how some of this stuff will play out on smaller-screen devices.