Why does my homescreen widget take two rows instead of one?

Question

So I read up on widget sizes and created a 250dpX72dp widget, expecting it to take up 4 columns by one row. On my 2.2 device it does indeed show as expected, but on my 4.2 device it suddenly takes up 4x2.

I thought the size per cell was calculated as (cells * 74) - 2.

The widget definition is as follows:

 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
 <appwidget-provider xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
    android:initialLayout="@layout/widget"
    android:minHeight="72dp"
    android:minWidth="250dp"
   />

score 3 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 11:57

You need to apply a different formula starting from API 11; according to the documentation its (70 * n) - 30; so that would mean you should set the minHeight to 40. You can create two resources for the height in different resource folders (being values and values-v11), that way you can specify the height according to the old formula in the values/<insert fancy name here>.xml and the height according to the new formula in values-v11/<insert fancy name here>.xml

Note that you should also take into account margins from API 15 up, which is done in a similar way: http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/appwidgets/index.html#CreatingLayout

There still seems to be a quirk with the sizing on newer devices though, where 250dp would take 3 columns instead of 4.

Why does my homescreen widget take two rows instead of one?

1 Answers1