When using Activities you can easily select the layout to be used as you wish in the onCreate() via setContentView(). But how do I accomplish this on an app widget? As far as I know the app widget's layout is determined by the corresponding AppWidgetProviderInfo.xml, which isn't configurable at runtime, is it?
So how can I select a specific layout depending on the device's version of Android?
AppWidgetProviderInfo provides the default initial layout, but you can specify a layout at runtime when creating your RemoteViews object for the appwidget.
RemoteViews remoteViews = new RemoteViews(context.getPackageName(),
R.layout.layout_id);
Combine this with checks against the android.os.Build.VERSION.SDK_INT value and that should probably get you where you want to go.
The best way to do this is to use the resource qualifiers in android, the same way you would substitute strings for a different locale or dimension for a different screen size. You can find more about this feature by looking at http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/resources/providing-resources.html#table2
You could use this to define a new widget XML specification in the xml/ directory or an alternative layout in the layout/ directory.
It would look something like this:
When you are running API 11 or greater, the layout file in layout_v11 will be used.
