I'm an iOS developer and I'm looking into Android programming. On the iPhone I can count on pretty much one screen size on all devices, but that's not necessarily the case on Android.
How is that handled on Android? What if you need a widget to be at least some size?
Is it possible to specify a lower bound for Android devices that you can use your app? Can I say I'll only allow touch-screen devices with some minimum screen size and prevent people from purchasing the app if their devices don't meet the minimums I'm expecting?
Thanks!
Bill,
The android developers page has pretty good information on supporting the various screen sizes: http://developer.android.com/guide/practices/screens_support.html
And yes, you can limit your application to particular screen sizes via: http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/manifest/supports-screens-element.html
good luck!
You can restrict applications based on a range of enumerated screen sizes. The market will filter apps based on those.
http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/manifest/supports-screens-element.html
Some widget design guidelines are available here. Please be aware that many custom home applications do not honor the standard sizes.
http://developer.android.com/guide/practices/ui_guidelines/widget_design.html
You could specify minimum specifications for your app, but that's not necessary. The Android Developer Documentation states that applications don't work directly with resolution and pixels, but rather with density independent pixels that allow you to scale your applications across a range of screen sizes.
Android provides you with an API for getting the real pixel density of the screen as one of 4 categories (low dpi, medium dpi, high dpi, and extra-high dpi), so your application can choose to display the proper visual resources for a given pixel density. In addition, there are a number of best practices that you can use to ensure that your application scales nicely across screens.
Related
I need to redesign an app from IOS to Android (only the GUI, no coding), but it has to be compatible (from the design point of view) with ICS, JB and KitKat versions.
I only designed apps for IOS not for android so, the problem is - I don't know what resolutions should I use (screen sizes in px and density - dpi). I understood that I have to do different sizes and I found this on google and this, but I still don't know where to begin from. Can anyone please tell me what sizes should I take in mind when designing the UI for the app? (like 480x800px at 320dpi, and so on).
you can try having a look at below page by android:
Supporting Multiple Screens
For total understanding of UI design in android you can have a look over here
Supporting Different Screen Sizes
Android have no standard screen size predefined but things getting better in Andoid 3.2+ by new qulalifiers like sw (screens wider than ...). Before that you could only use size-buckets like large, normal, small which was not suitable for all ranges of android devices (in order to have a big picture, there are around 4000+ differnet android devices out there!).
you can have a look over official android blog for comprehensive details about this.
I'm required to design an apps for android.
And after some reading, I find out android device are divided into few categories in term of resolution, like
small screen
normal screen
large screen
extra large screen
but in different density.
So lets say, now I need to come out a design for normal screen, what resolution that I should use for the "look & feel" of the apps UI.
From the reading, I know android apps are use dp instead of px. So, is it means I have to convert few specific screen size to dp before I start to design ?
Or I just simply target a common resolution for normal screen size like 320x480, provided I will have few set drawable in different density ?
Please correct me if I had mistaken it.
Thank you
Good question, so far we have 5 screen densities :
xxhdpi,xhdpi,hdpi,mdpi,ldpi , now if you have an image resource you will need to create 5 copies of it, its always recommended to start by the xxhdpi till you reach to the smallest,
however you can use online calculators that will calculate the PX and DP for all the densities, i recommend these two tools android developer toolbox and developers tools, and with developers tools you can test the colors, and how are they going to look like in the screen in HEX decimal.
Yes it is true android has following types of devices
LDPI
MDPI
HDPI
XHDPI
http://developer.android.com/guide/practices/screens_support.html
this link gives you all the description
and ya you have to create icons and images supporting to all the devices resolution wise.
There are various devices with various screen sizes.
Usually, they are mentioned as LDPI, MDPI, HDPI or XHDPI devices.
Although, in coding there are many things to be kept in mind so that you achieve a good uniform design in all your devices !
Refer to this link. It is always good to follow official sites, rather than other tutorials out there. Make a habit of using relativelayout !
Also in the link you can explore many things to get the knowledge of designing in Android.
I am developing an Android application. I want to know the minimum usable screen width that is recommended by best practises working group for a mobile web application.
I did search on this topic, but can't find out appropriate solution for this. Can anyone help me in this regard?
If you look at the supporting screens information provided here
http://developer.android.com/guide/practices/screens_support.html
you can see that even screens that fall into the 'small' profile are generally at least 320dp (dp stands for density pixel and translates to 240px for low density devices and 480px for higher density devices)
With that, I would suggest supporting at least 240px to be very safe, however the number of devices with this profile are somewhat low and I would think it would be OK to only support a width of at least 320px.
I am new to Android. Like in iPhone we have a standard pixel sized of 320*480 to work with on the screen. What are the specifications for Android based devices.
There are many different Android devices with many different screen sizes. You can read the official documentation for advice on how to handle these variations.
http://developer.android.com/guide/practices/screens_support.html
The variety is to large to limit your app like that. On iPhone you have two devices (now, also iPad), here you have a limitless number.
You would better use the DPI (density independent pixel) and also scale your image to the screen dimensions (gathered at run-time)
http://developer.android.com/guide/practices/screens_support.html
How big is the smallest motorola android's screen, in pixels? I want to know what size I need to make my graphic without it being too distorted by the fill_parent.
Although this doesn't directly answer your question..
Android is the name of the operating system running on Android phones. Different phone models could have different resolutions and pixel densities. Therefore you have to be careful not to hardcode resolution values into your code. It might run well on one phone but poorly on another.
Check out these pages for details about supporting different screens:
http://developer.android.com/guide/practices/screens_support.html
http://developer.android.com/resources/dashboard/screens.html
It would be unwise to program for one screen size, especially if you plan on distributing your application later. You should design your application for as many screen sizes as possible.
Instead use nine-patch images and flexible layouts.
If you are designing an icon, the look at the android icon design guidelines and consider high, medium and low density screens. There are different resource folders for these too and android takes care of selecting the appropriate one for the current device.
motorola droid's display size is 480x854 px, according to specs, so it's rather non-standard