Adding Samsung multi-window support to Android application

Question

I went and tried to add Samsung's multi-window support for my app following this link. My app did appear in Samsung's multi-window applications tab, and I was able to drag and drop it into the screen, however my app did not behave as multi-window supported app should behave, but instead expanded to full screen.

I think there are some other changes that are need to be made to get it work properly, but I have no idea what. Does anyone have any ideas what could be the problem causing this behaviour?

Answer 1

This xda-developers forum post contains a step-by-step guide, which I've paraphrased here.

Make sure your manifest contains the following somewhere inside the <application> tag:

<uses-library android:required="false" android:name="com.sec.android.app.multiwindow" /> <meta-data android:name="com.sec.android.support.multiwindow" android:value="true" /> <meta-data android:name="com.sec.android.multiwindow.DEFAULT_SIZE_W" android:resource="@dimen/app_defaultsize_w" /> <meta-data android:name="com.sec.android.multiwindow.DEFAULT_SIZE_H" android:resource="@dimen/app_defaultsize_h" /> <meta-data android:name="com.sec.android.multiwindow.MINIMUM_SIZE_W" android:resource="@dimen/app_minimumsize_w" /> <meta-data android:name="com.sec.android.multiwindow.MINIMUM_SIZE_H" android:resource="@dimen/app_minimumsize_h" /> 

For the desired activity, add to its <intent-filter> tag:

<category android:name="android.intent.category.MULTIWINDOW_LAUNCHER" /> 

Be sure to define the dimensions above in a resource file.

In the comments section of that blog post a user mentions that the minimum size was causing a problem for him and suggested removing com.sec.android.multiwindow.MINIMUM_SIZE_W and com.sec.android.multiwindow.MINIMUM_SIZE_H.

One user pointed out that specifying the dimensions through a dimension resource didn't work for him; he instead hardcoded the value attribute:

<uses-library android:required="false" android:name="com.sec.android.app.multiwindow" /> <meta-data android:name="com.sec.android.support.multiwindow" android:value="true" /> <meta-data android:name="com.sec.android.multiwindow.DEFAULT_SIZE_W" android:value="632.0dip" /> <meta-data android:name="com.sec.android.multiwindow.DEFAULT_SIZE_H" android:value="598.0dip" /> <meta-data android:name="com.sec.android.multiwindow.MINIMUM_SIZE_W" android:value="632.0dip" /> <meta-data android:name="com.sec.android.multiwindow.MINIMUM_SIZE_H" android:value="598.0dip" /> 

I'm afraid I can't try myself as I don't have a Galaxy Note.

Answer 2

After testing my application on Galaxy Note 3 I found out two more things:

MINIMUM_SIZE and DEFAULT_SIZE only works on MultiWindow for Samsung tablets, not in smartphones.

Also if you want to enable Multi-Instance in your application add this line to your AndroidManifest:

<meta-data
            android:name="com.samsung.android.sdk.multiwindow.multiinstance.enable"
            android:value="true" />