Chapter 7. Designing for Multiple Screen Sizes

In early 2011, Android Honeycomb 3.0 (API level 11) was released specifically to support larger screen-sized tablets. Since then, the Android ecosystem has exploded and all subsequent Android releases have been targeted to offer more screen sizes, including smart phones, tablets, and Google TV.

This chapter will walk you through dealing with multiple screen sizes and making your application compatible to work with smart phones and tablets. In the course of this chapter, we will extend the POIApp we have been developing and optimize it for Android tablets. The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

• Introduction to the Android tablets ecosystem
• Creating and managing fragments
• Making POIApp compatible with Android tablets
• Dealing with ListFragment to display the POI list
• Creating the multi-pane layout for tablets
• Adding alternative layouts for Android tablets
• Using DialogFragment to display dialogs
• Working with fragments for older...