Support for Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0) in 2.2

With the advent of Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0), Google has put a single OS for both phones and tablets. All the enhancements of Honeycomb are now available on phones, which mostly good, but it means that we need to update our applications to correctly support the new UI.

Most relevant to us are:
  • Action bar is now available on phones, our icons are no longer suitable to put there, it’s too big and has Android 2.2 style.
  • The width of action bar is limited on phones, we can’t cramp so many buttons into it. Some of them needs to be put in the overflow menu.
  • And most importantly, some ICS users experienced flicker when opening preferences and going back to the main screen. It is to the extent that the app is unusable. After some investigation, it was due to setting locale forcefully interferes with setting of the locale from the OS, unlike in previous releases. 
The new icons are used for Android 2.3 and above. Android 2.2 and lower will get the old icons.
Thanks to +Alta Falconeri for the help of reporting and testing this issue.

3 thoughts on “Support for Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0) in 2.2

  1. My Galaxy Note just got upgraded to 4.03 android and I lost some screen to a new 3/8" thick title bar. I definitely prefered the extra screen and considered this the best Bible reading app out there. I hope it can become optional.

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