Question

I upgraded to Android 4.2 and all of a sudden the linear gradient on my home widget isn’t behaving as intended. instead of a gradient i seem to get a constant band. then if i restart the device the gradient starts “working” again, which is very puzzling. I have talked to other team members and their devices don’t seem to have an issue. Here is a screen shot of the problem:

The gradient is applied over the bottom half of the image and should go from semi-transparent at the bottom to fully transparent at the top. Instead you can see a basically constant semi-transparent area at the bottom half of the image. The layout is something like:

<RelativeLayout>
  <ImageView
    android:layout_width="match_parent"
    android:layout_height="match_parent"/>

    <LinearLayout
      android:layout_width="match_parent"
      android:layout_height="wrap_content"
      android:layout_alignParentBottom="true"
      android:layout_alignParentLeft="true"
      android:background="@drawable/gradient"
      android:orientation="vertical" >
...

while the gradient background is

<shape>
    <gradient
        android:angle="90"
        android:startColor="#D0000000"
        android:endColor=  "#00000000"
        android:type="linear" />
</shape>

Answer 1

i found that forcing s/w acceleration on the linear layout (setting android:layerType="software") fixed the issue.