18. A Guide to the Android ConstraintLayout
As discussed in the chapter entitled “Understanding Android Views, View Groups and Layouts”, Android provides a number of layout managers for the purpose of designing user interfaces. With Android 7, Google introduced a new layout that is intended to address many of the shortcomings of the older layout managers. This new layout, called ConstraintLayout, combines a simple, expressive and flexible layout system with powerful features built into the Android Studio Layout Editor tool to ease the creation of responsive user interface layouts that adapt automatically to different screen sizes and changes in device orientation.
This chapter will outline the basic concepts of ConstraintLayout while the next chapter will provide a detailed overview of how constraint-based layouts can be created using ConstraintLayout within the Android Studio Layout Editor tool.