UI framework changes in Android 1.5

On Monday, we released an early look at the Android 1.5 SDK. Not only does this platform update contain numerous new features, APIs, and bug fixes, but Android 1.5 also brings a new default look for the Android UI framework. After Android 1.0 and 1.1, our designers worked hard to refine and polish the appearance of the system. The screenshots below show the same activity (creating a new contact) on Android 1.1 and Android 1.5:

You can see in this example that the buttons and checkboxes have a new appearance. Even though these changes do not affect binary nor source compatibility, they might still break the UI of your apps. As part of the UI refresh, the minimum size of some of the widgets has changed. For instance, Android 1.1 buttons have a minimum size of 44x48 pixels whereas Android 1.5 buttons now have a minimum size of 24x48 pixels. The image below compares the sizes of Android 1.1 buttons with Android 1.5 buttons:

If you rely on the button's minimum size, then the layout of your application may not be the same in Android 1.5 as it was in Android 1.1 because of this change. This would happen for instance if you created a grid of buttons using LinearLayout and relying on the minimum size yielded by wrap_content to align the buttons properly:

This layout could easily be fixed by using the android:layout_weight attribute or by replacing the LinearLayout containers with a TableLayout.

This example is probably the worst-case UI issue you may encounter when running your application on Android 1.5. Other changes introduced in Android 1.5, especially bug fixes in the layout views, may also impact your application—especially if it is relying on faulty/buggy behavior of the UI framework.

If you encounter issues when running your application on Android 1.5, please join us on the Google groups or IRC so that we and the Android community can help you fix your application.

Happy coding!