Next Gen Android application for foldable and large screen devices

Android devices in recent years have been expanding to other form factors than just mobile phones. Now these devices include foldables, tablets, laptops, mobile-app capable cars, as well as headsets and glasses running on Android XR. Some Android phone models also allow users to connect the phone to an external monitor.

All the mentioned devices and use cases desire a dedicated user experience, but the current reality does not reflect that. Android applications are designed and implemented for mobile-only user experience. This is usually represented by portrait only applications, that do not allow the application to rotate in landscape orientation, setting a minimum or maximum aspect ratio, and disabling resizing activities. Adapting the user experience for other devices requires additional effort, and for that reason it is often ignored and neglected, leaving the users of these devices often frustrated and unserved.

For this reason, Google has been updating its policies and requirements, to speed up the adaptive user interface (UI) and enforce the Android applications to implement it in the incoming year.

Starting from August 31, 2025, Google has introduced a new requirement for applications that are on the Google Play store. Application owners or developers must update their applications to target an Android API level within one year of the release of the Android API level. If an application does not comply with this requirement, it will stop being discoverable on the Google Play store to users that have a device with a higher Android OS version than the application is targeting. In other words, the application will not be available for users with the newest devices or users that have updated their Android operation system to the latest version.

In the newest Android API level that is supposed to be released this summer, restrictions on the orientation, resizeability and aspect ratio no longer apply on devices with larger screens. This change might introduce breaking changes for some of the application or in the most cases result only a stretched-out UI. Ref: (https://developer.android.com/about/versions/17/changes/ff-restrictions-ignored). Applications will have a period of one year, until next summer to target the new Android API and address these changes. There are two strategies available:

1. Do the bare minimum to be complaint and only stretch the UI, which does not result in a pleasant user experience.

2. Optimize the UI to adapt to various window and screen sizes and provide an engaging user experience, which requires additional effort and resources.

Google's new design philosophy and recommended application development principle is an adaptive application approach. Applications that can adapt and render the UI dynamically depending on the screen size and orientation. This may sound simple, but it means a lot of additional effort in designing, implementing and testing multiple UIs and layouts on multiple device form factors. If the application is already structured in an architecture that separates the business logic layer and the view layer, the application needs to only make changes in the view layer, which include adding and implementing additional designs and reacting to the window resizing.

Adaptive design approach is nothing new in the world of software development; websites have been able to resize and adapt their content to the available browser window. This new design principle from Google requires the people that are involved in Android application development: application owners, designers, and developers to change their way of thinking about the current design and implementation approach. On large screen devices there is available space to show the content of 2 or more "traditional screens".

Therefore, the new design guidance is to stop thinking in terms of screens and start thinking in terms of panes. This is similar to the analogy of multiples panes in a window of a house. Panes are the new foundational unit of a layout, and thinking in terms of panes focuses on grouping content in panes, establishing relationship between panes and assigning adaptation strategies for panes. In practice, the application should be able to dynamically adjust its layout by swapping components (panes), showing or hiding content based on the available window size.

Adaptive design does not only focus on the screen or window size, but it also supports going a step further and provides a possibility to implement a unique UI based on the display postures of foldable device. For example, an application can detect if a foldable device is a half-open state of the device's screen and render the layout accordingly.

Building adaptive does not mean only focusing on how the application looks on the devices; it also extends beyond touch and the screen. Google also advocates for the application to adapt and to support external accessories, since users can often connect external/hardware keyboards, trackpads, mice and styluses to the devices for increased productivity. The native TextField component from the Jetpack library, used for user input in Android applications, enables users to write with a stylus by default.

Building adaptive Android applications is not only a “required” cost, but it comes with some included benefits. Android ecosystem has more than 500 million devices, meeting the needs of all the potential users and providing a tailored experience for them, expanding the reach and the potential return of the investment of the application. Building adaptive also means increased visibility, since Google is actively promoting applications on the Play Store that are well optimized for different device form factors. In most cases devices with larger screens are more expensive than standard mobile phones, so by providing an optimized experience for users with higher spending potential can lead to higher returns (high monetary or in-app engagement). According to the studies that Google has made, they found out that:

1. Users on both mobile phone and table spend 3x more time in an application compared to phone-only users.

2. Users with large screens are spending 5x more compared to phone-only users.

3. Users with a phone and a large screen device are spending 9x more compared to phone-only users.

To get familiarized with the new way of thinking when implementing Android applications, test the new libraries that Android provides for handling and presenting panes, we have created a small showcase application. It is a fork of "KMP-App-Template-Native" (Apache License 2.0), a Kotlin Multiplatform (KMP) template provided by Jetbrains, used as a basis to adapt an existing application to a new adaptive approach. The code can be found on the following repository on Github.

The application is initially implemented using the native view approach for building KMP application, so it is a perfect example to showcase implementing an adaptive approach with business and UI layers separated properly. We modified only the Android View layer, the business logic and the iOS View layer remain unchanged.

An adaptive design approach brings a new perspective for designing and developing mobile applications that are optimized for a variety of Android devices and screen sizes. The policy and requirement changes clearly show that Google is pushing "agressively" towards building adaptive mobile applications that can support all the devices across the Android ecosystem.

Google's Android team is focusing on emphasizing the benefits of building adaptive, and they are giving a lot of examples, guidance and providing resources to the application owners, designers and developers in their adaption journey. Overall, the resources available are sufficient to build a unique adaptive design for every use case and application category. We will have to wait and see throught the following year whether the application will do a bare minimum and only stretch the UI or they will create a variety of creative adaptive designs.

I am cheering for the second option, I want the hardware innovation of the foldables and 2-in-1 mobile devices to continue, and that can only happen if enough users are interested and buying these devices. For that to be the case, the software experience must be better or on a par with the hardware experience.

The mobile team at adesso continuously explores adaptive Android concepts in practice, trying out emerging libraries and validating them on a wide range of Android devices. This includes prototyping with the latest Material 3 guidance, testing window size classes on phones, tablets, and foldables, and refining layouts to adapt gracefully as users resize or rotate their screens. By incorporating these patterns into internal demos and pilot projects, we ensure that our recommendations are based on real-world behavior rather than theory alone.