Question

I want to do something like in iPhone development: reposition controls manually without recreating the whole view.
what are pros and cons of this approach?

Answer 1

Hopefully this will be useful for somebody.

if you don’t want ro re-create your view on orientation change, the only thing you need is to change corresponding Activity in manifest file like this:

android:configChanges="keyboardHidden|orientation|keyboard"

if you want to reposition controls manually, override onConfigurationChanged and reposition everything you need there

@Override
public void onConfigurationChanged(Configuration newConfig) {
    super.onConfigurationChanged(newConfig);

    // reposition and/or hide/show controls here
}