Android Tip: Watch Screen Sizes

Yesterday was Droid Day. Honestly, it was crazy from my perspective. I’ve been a G1 owner for 6 months now and I love the phone. I’ve been trying to convince people to buy Android phones since. Some people did, some people said “Nah, I want to wear a turtleneck and drink mocha latte’s while discussing the influence art” (get an iPhone). But, droid day, whoa, serious people came out of the wood work and bought phones. The team at my client went from 3 out of 8 people having android phones to 7/8 literally overnight.

Anyway, the point of this post is this: With all the new Android phones coming out, screen resolution/density is something you HAVE to watch out for when developing Android apps. Use the emulator to test ALL different densities and resolutions. You MUST, otherwise your app wont get the attention it deserves.

Example: My apps looked great on the HVGA screen (default G1 size) but looked like poo-poo on larger density screens. Things were out of place, mis-aligned, etc.

A friend of mine, Joshua Dobbs, posted a great blog article on how to get around this in the short term (to at least get some “best-case” app rendering) by adding a few properties to your manifest.

Check out the post here.