Udacity Android Developer Nanodegree - Tablet App Quality Guidelines

Introduction

This guideline acts as the official document to follow in your projects. Udacity reviewers will use this guide to grade your projects(along with the respective rubrics). All Android apps that you code in your projects should meet the criteria listed below. For a more detailed set of rules to assess the basic quality of your apps with, refer to this link.

Optimize Layouts for Larger Screens

To give the users the best possible experience on several screen configurations, make sure you optimize the layout and the UI for targeted screens. On tablets, optimizing the layout involves making use of the additional screen space to offer new features, present new content, or enhance the experience in other ways to deepen user engagement.

Get rid of "stretched" UI: On tablets, single-pane layouts lead to awkward whitespace and excessive line lengths. Use padding to reduce the width of UI elements and consider using multi-pane layouts.

Whitespace Layout

Take Advantage of Extra Screen Area

Use Assets Designed for Tablet Screens

Adjust Font Sizes and Touch Targets

Full Feature Set for Tablet Users

Target Android Versions Properly

To ensure the broadest possible distribution to tablets, make sure that your app properly targets the Android versions that support tablets.

At a minimum, check the <uses-sdk> element to make sure that:

Declare Hardware Feature Dependencies Properly

Handsets and tablets typically offer slightly different hardware support for sensors, camera, telephony, and other features. For these reasons make sure your appdoes not require hardware features that are not commonly available on tablets. Declare the hardware features as not required in the app manifest, as described below:

After adding the not required attribute, make sure to check that your app functions without any errors in a variety of devices. This makes sure the app offers "graceful degradation" and alternative functionality wherever appropriate.

Declare Support for Tablet Screens

To ensure that you can distribute your app to a broad range of tablets, your app should declare support for tablet screen sizes in its manifest file, as follows: