Why does an Android 2.3.3 7 inch tablet use xlarge resources?

Question

My app has different layouts and styles for xlarge screens. This is important because on phones it is only used in portrait and on tablets it is only used in landscape.

A user contacted me a few days ago because since I published the update with the tablets layouts he can't see some of the objects in my main activity (prior to this update I only had portrait layouts - also on tablets). He uses a 7 inch tablet running Android 2.3.3 and for some odd reason it is using the layouts and styles from the xlarge directories even thew it should use the default layouts and styles.

I tested it on the emulator and had the same problem. I then changed only the android version to 3.1 (did not change width, height and density) and it worked as expected - the default layouts were used.

I don't want to use version qualifiers (layout-xlarge-v13) because then users with old android versions that have an xlarge screen will get the wrong layouts. For android 3.2 and up I could use sw720dp but older versions will not use this so problem remains.

I am able to tell at run time that the device is not large enough for the xlarge layouts but what can I do in that situation? Is there a way to make it use the default resources?

Answer 1

Android doesn't give its blessing to any 7-inch tablets running Gingerbread or below since Honeycomb was released. This means your device must be either old, or non-CTS compliant. You are looking at an extremely small pool of devices that are: API level 7-10 (roughly), 7-10 inches in size, that live outside the main Android ecosystem.

If you want to support such devices, I would recommend that you make layout-large-v7 and layout-large-v11. Assume that these nonstandard tablets will select the first one, and design for low- or medium-density 1024x600-pixel displays.