Selecting the Screen Type for GUI Design

Android devices can run on many types of devices. In this chapter, you’ll design an Android phone GUI. As we mentioned in the Before You Begin section, we use an AVD that emulates the Google Nexus 4 phone for this purpose. The Graphical Layout editor comes with many device configurations that represent various screen sizes and resolutions that you can use to design your GUI. For this chapter, we use the predefined Nexus 4, which we selected in the screen-type drop-down list in Fig. 2.12. This does not mean that the app can execute only on a Nexus 4 device—it simply means that the design is for devices similar in screen size and resolution to the Nexus 4. In later chapters, you’ll learn how to design your GUIs to scale appropriately for a wide range of devices.