Question

I’m using ActionBar‘s tab feature with a PageViewer, but meet a problem. On my Nexus 7, the tabs show like this:

You can see the title is cut due to lacking space. But on HTC Incredible S with Android 4.0 it shows like:

And this is what I want. I in factr want the tab bar be placed on bottom of screen though, but splitting to two rows and both on top is acceptable.

Does anyone know how to force app on Nexus 7 also split tab bar to another row? Thank you!

Answer 1

AFAIK, the action bar alone decides whether or not to put the tabs on a second row, and we cannot influence that.

Also, bear in mind that in many cases, your tabs will not appear at all, replaced by a drop-down list — basically, Android converts tab navigation to list navigation.

If you want to ensure that your tabs are always tabs, and are always below the action bar, remove the tabs from the action bar and switch to using a ViewPager for your content, with either PagerTabStrip (from the Android Support package, where ViewPager comes from) or the tab indicator from the ViewPagerIndicator project for the tabs themselves. As a side benefit, your contents are now horizontally swipe-able to move between tabs, which is a popular approach nowadays.

I in factr want the tab bar be placed on bottom of screen though

Please bear in mind that this violates the Android Design guidelines: http://developer.android.com/design/patterns/pure-android.html