How to remove vertical letterboxing from android TV app?

Question

I have submitted an android tv app to the play store and got rejection email explaining the reason that: Not designed in landscape orientation. Your app has vertical letterboxing when displayed on TV's. Please design your app to be displayed in landscape orientation. I have tried removing margins from the screen designs but it didn't helped me. Can anyone help me in solving this issue. I have already added the leanback launcher intent and software.leanback uses feature tag with true value. Thanks In Advance.

Answer 1

You don't want to just remove padding/margins without explicitly testing it. You have to deal with overscan on TVs, so having anything important at the very edge means it might not be visible on some devices. On ATV, the normal values are 48dp horizontally and 27dp vertically. If you're using the Leanback library, this is handled for you.

Vertical letterboxing is almost always a case of something that's inherently portrait orientation being show in landscape.

You should verify that none of your activities have a screenOrientation set (unless it's landscape). It's pretty common for people to forget one particular screen is forced to portrait (e.g., a login screen from a 3rd party SDK). A quick launch of each Activity/Fragment on an ATV emulator will also help you catch anything wildly wrong.

If your app has video, you also want to make sure you're reasonably matching the aspect ratio. For example, you should display a 16x9 video instead of a 2x3 video on landscape.