What is the screen height of an android device as thrown by metrics?

Question

I'm writing an app that I want it to work with different screen sizes.

While in portrait mode I divide the screen height by 5 in order to set it the result as the height for text views. Hence no matter what screen there should allways be five textviews.

I have a tablet with a 1280 pixel height, which display metrics height returns as 1232. In my phone with 1980, display metrics height shows 1776. These are the values that I divide by 5.

I see the 5 textviews in my tablet perfectly but in my phone the lasts textview is almost entirely off the screen. So my question is what is the height that is returned?

Answer 1

That height returned is the screen height, minus the height of the notification bar. But you still have things like the action bar taking space.

Answer 2

Instead of dividing and do all the complicate math...

If you use a LinearLayout, you can set the weights of your TextViews to fit the screen nicely.
Just set all their weights to 1 and their height to 0dp.

So, if tou have 4 TextViews, they will be as tall as the 25% of the usable height.
If you have 5 (which is your case), they will be as tall as the 20% of the usable height.

And you'll avoid headaches.