Question

I’m making an Android AppWidget to sit on the home screen.

The user’s home screen space is precious, so I want the widget to be small. The ideal size would be 2×1 cells.

• Some documentation suggests you can have any size you like?
• But the AppWidget graphical design guidelines imply that only standard sizes are supported: 4×1, 3×3, 2×2.
  • Does that refer to the available PhotoShop templates or is it a limitation of Android itself?
• I’m finding that a 2×1 widget works on my actual device (HTC Wildfire) but expands to 2×2 on the emulator.
  • HTC have their own special implementation of the home screen, so maybe my widget will only work at 2×1 on HTC devices?

Is there any way to create a 2×1 widget, or should I use a standard size?

My widget was adapted from the Simple Wiktionary sample.

• The manifest has android:minWidth="146dip" and android:minHeight="72dip".
• There’s a RelativeLayout with android:layout_width="fill_parent" and android:layout_height="wrap_content"

I’m just starting with Android, so apologies in advance if this is a silly question. 🙂

Answer 1

I’m just starting with Android, so apologies in advance if this is a silly question. 🙂

It’s definitely not a silly question.

Does that refer to the available PhotoShop templates or is it a limitation of Android
itself?

I was under the impression that 2×1 was a legal size, but I have not tried one of that size.

HTC have their own special implementation of the home screen, so maybe my widget will only
work at 2×1 on HTC devices?

Different home screen implementations might interpret the sizing differently, though I would hope that they would be generally consistent.

Is there any way to create a 2×1 widget, or should I use a standard size?

You could experiment with smaller android:minHeight values, to see if there is a new threshold you need to convince the emulator to give you a 2×1 app widget. That being said, you may have more consistent results with a 2×2 app widget.