6 posts
Android 16 makes external displays a mainstream concern. The layout work is mostly window size classes you already have; the new parts are density, input capability and deciding what belongs on which screen.
Foldables give two things a resize doesn't: a posture and a hinge with real coordinates. Handling them well means avoiding the seam and using tabletop mode, not just supporting a new width.
SupportingPaneScaffold docks secondary content beside a primary view on wide windows and collapses it to a sheet on narrow ones. Choosing it over list-detail is a question about what the second pane contains.
ListDetailPaneScaffold adapts a list and detail across window sizes, but its real value is the navigator — which makes back pop the detail on compact and exit the screen on expanded, from one implementation.
Material's canonical layouts give three tested patterns for adapting across window sizes. Knowing which one a screen is saves designing an adaptive layout from scratch, and the library implements two of them directly.
Window size classes replace device-type checks with a measure of the window your app actually occupies. Three buckets per axis, recomputed live, and the reason isTablet() has been wrong for years.
