UI for Android - What resolution to design for?

Question

I'd like my app to work on phones (320x480 usually) and tablets (840x600, 800x600 and 1024x600).

I'm not sure which resolution to design for and how it would scale on various devices. Can anyone please suggest what resolution and dpi should I use?

Answer 1

Discussing this with Tim Bray in a conference he said:

You should design for the biggest resolution and the higher dpi and then scale to the smaller ones.

Right now I think that tablet version requieres a different layout with different UX. For instance I would try using Fragments on the tablet version of my app.

Answer 2

Have a look at this resource:

• Supporting Multiple Screens

Answer 3

Android handles different screen resolutions automatically in that you specify sizes in "dip" (device independent pixels) and by providing different drawable folders (drawable-hdpi, drawable-mdpi, drawable-ldpi) where drawables are fetched depending on the resolution capabilities of the device your app is running on.

If you want to target tablets specifically, then I'd start coding for the Honeycomb system. Devices will be available soon ;) The SDK is already available on the developer.android.com site.

Answer 4

Recently i developed a android app its in the market by name Starrpartners in this i use the design of 320x480 as a target and putting the images in mdpi folder. it worked pretty well on higher resolution as well .

You can check it by making your app and running it on different resolution simulator . Hope it helps :)