Real-world apps

So far, we have designed one fairly significant app and a dozen or more mini apps. Some we designed for tablets, but we designed most of them on the Nexus 5 phone. Also, most of the screenshots in this book have been on the Nexus 5 emulator.

Of course, in the real world, our apps need to work well on any device and must be able to handle what happens when in either portrait or landscape view (on all devices).

Furthermore, it is often not enough for our apps to just work and look OK on different devices. Often, our apps will need to behave differently and appear with a significantly different UI based on whether the device is a phone, a tablet, or in the landscape/portrait orientation.

Note

Android has supported apps for large screen TV's for some time now, and in 2015, it introduced the Wear API to build apps for Android watches. We will not be covering these two most-extreme cases in this book.

Take a look at this screenshot of the BBC news app running on an Android phone...