Question

I’m building an App for Android that already exists for iOS. On iOS, we really like to use the listview grouped style to show details and forms. It is really useful to show details of objects that we don’t know how much properties they have before loading it.

I know that Android doesn’t have a similar tableview style. And I don’t want to use a custom library to recreate it, because I don’t want to force an iOS like interface to my Android’s users.

But how would you create a consistent Android interface that show similar information? Do you have example for me?

Answer 1

First of all, your instinct to not force iOS style UI onto Android users is correct and I respect you for it.

Android’s ListView is roughly the equivalent of iOS’s UITableView. There are important differences. For instance, you should never use a ListView inside another scrollable container. If a ListView is in a particular layout, it should (usually) be the only scrollable component. If you want multiple ListViews in a layout, you probably don’t want ListViews at all. You should instead use (vertical) LinearLayouts and add the items in order.

Cyril Mottier writes excellent posts on implementing custom behavior for Android’s ListView.