Hey all! Thanks for your advice so far.

To give everyone an idea of our design dilemma here are the 3 layouts (larger layouts are a bit older and not as up-to-date as the small one!) I came up with for phones and tablets on Android. The per-pixel specs on them is 800x480 for small and 1280x800 for the larger.

UI-Template-Android-800x480.jpg
800x480 1x scale Game Map (Small Android)

UI-Template-Android-1280x800.jpg
1280x800 2x scale Game Map (Android Tablet)

UI-Template-Android-1280x800-2.jpg
1280x800 2.25x scale Game Map (Android Tablet)

Now I know that these do not match up with what Google specifies as it's preferred dp sizes. However this is my problem. How can I make my layouts match up with what Google proposes, which to my opinion is a rather tiny scale of (dp) pixels, dots, tiny blobs of colour, whatever you want to call it. I need to display all 19x19 tiles and they are only 16x16 in pixel size so it's not like I can pretend to smoosh them into individual 8x8 or 4x4 dp space and imagine everything will be ok. The dp unit scale size they specify is just TOO SMALL to design a nice interface going with their numbers.

From the Android developer site:

As you design your UI for different screen sizes, you'll discover that each design requires a minimum amount of space. So, each generalized screen size above has an associated minimum resolution that's defined by the system. These minimum sizes are in "dp" units—the same units you should use when defining your layouts—which allows the system to avoid worrying about changes in screen density.


  • xlarge screens are at least 960dp x 720dp
  • large screens are at least 640dp x 480dp
  • normal screens are at least 470dp x 320dp
  • small screens are at least 426dp x 320dp


Note: These minimum screen sizes were not as well defined prior to Android 3.0, so you may encounter some devices that are mis-classified between normal and large. These are also based on the physical resolution of the screen, so may vary across devices—for example a 1024x720 tablet with a system bar actually has a bit less space available to the application due to it being used by the system bar.


I need to either limit stupidly small screens or fortify some kind of screen-space guarantee in the game code that I can fit 19 of my map tiles from top to bottom and still have a fair enough space on screen on either side to fit my virtual game controls. If I we can't hit *every* device under the sun, thats ok (people are smart enough to know what they are buying) as long as the ones our game does supports will at least look nice.

I'm quickly becoming "not a fan" of the Android platform because of this poor choice in target screen sizes. Can some Android dev rockstar post from this and change my mind?