Android - common techniques for scaling screen layouts

Question

I realise this topic has been covered to death, and I have read the official and unofficial developer guides on it so know the theory. But I'm still unsure which path to take to ensure my app looks good on multiple screen sizes. My app is a simple navigation style app which is designed to be portrait only. At this stage I'm not interested in making different designs for landscape or multi-pane screens for tablets etc. I just want each screen to be scaled up/down so it looks in proportion with the screen size it is being displayed on - i.e. text and images are sized up/down as appropriate. I designed the app for a classic 480x800 hdpi device which it looks great on, I just want to make it look in proportion for the Galaxy S3/Nexus 7 etc. I'm already following these guidelines :

• Using RelativeLayouts
• Using DP units for padding/margins
• Using SP units for fonts
• Using 9-patch images for buttons

However I'm finding it still looks small and a bit lost in the middle of the screen on the larger devices. In particular, my main menu screen is a grid of 6 image buttons which I can't get to scale well. I don't want to have multiple copies to maintain of the same screen (normal/large/xlarge), just want one layout. I was considering the following :

• Using value-normal/value-large etc. folders to store XML files with DP/SP values for sizes of images/text
• Changing RelativeLayouts to LinearLayouts with weights (although I initially struggled with LinearLayouts and changed to RelativeLayouts

Are either of these valid approaches, or is there a better approach?

Answer 1

Personally, I would go with the first option. While this will work well for phones, it will make the layout seem somewhat bloated on tablets. Hence, another approach would be to create separate layouts for tablets and place them in the layout-large and layout-xlarge folders for 7" and 10" tablets respectively.