Configure libgdx games to be "designed for tablets"

Question

I have built a game by libgdx and uploaded the apk file to the developer console. However, it says that

Your Production APK needs to meet the following criteria:

• Your layout should make use of the available space on tablets

So what changes should I make to the layout? Because as far as I know, in libgdx, layout is completely irrelevant to the game.

Answer 1

I faced the same problem with my latest libgdx app, although it looked good on tablets as well. After having tried a couple of things I achieved getting my app recognized as "designed for tablets" by Google:

After a web research I found this "Design for Tablet Contact Form": https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/contact/tabletq

Here you have to submit your email and app package name and write your appeal.

The main part of my argumentation was the following:

I am drawing the game using a game engine called libgdx, which I configured to take care about tablet screens optimization as well. So most of the layout handling is done in libgdx, the standard android layout I just use for positioning the admob banner.

Important note: be sure to have tested your app in tablets and try to be in your app design as close as possible to the suggestions in Google's tablet guidelines before submitting this form.

I got within 30 minutes (!) an answer from Google that they will a add "designed for tablets" to the app!

So my conclusion is that google first tries to automatically check the design by some algorithm, but since libgdx does not use the standard android layout it might fail to see it optimized for tablets. But after getting the libgdx manually reviewed I got the "designed for tablets" label very fast.