Force Locale on Android

While playing with localization on the Android for my app I came upon an annoying bug. It seems running on Motorola Milestone the fonts were getting smaller on each locale update.

I use the following code for locale changing (from http://almondmendoza.com/2009/01/28/force-localize-an-application-on-android/):

String languageToLoad  = "de";
Locale locale = new Locale(languageToLoad);
Locale.setDefault(locale);
Configuration config = new Configuration();
config.locale = locale;
getBaseContext().getResources().updateConfiguration(config, null);

Also in the AndroidManifest.xml I have (without this entry you get "Something wrong here, didn't expect "mypackagename" to be resumed"):

<activity
  android:label="@string/app_name"
  android:name=".Dex"
  android:configChanges="locale">

Here is how my screen should look like:

And here is how it was looking on Motorola Milestone.

After changing the Locale from Preferences the fonts keep gettting smaller and smaller

This was very annoying. I did not know exactly why this was happening. So I decided to reproduce the Milestone in the emulator. I got the specifications of the Milestone from the web and created in Eclipse an AVD with a resolution of 480x854 and density of 240.

After that I was able to reproduce the bug. It seems the density was the issue here. I searched for Android density and after some tries I found the solution. It seems I needed to have this in the AndroidManifest.xml

<supports-screens
android:smallScreens="true"
android:normalScreens="true"
android:largeScreens="true"
android:anyDensity="true"
/>

The most important is the android:anyDensity =" true ". After this, the application was shown correctly even on the Motorola Milestone.  

I hope this will be of help and don't forget to check out my enhanced logcat tool here http://adrianvintu.com/blogengine/post/Colored-Logcat-Script-for-Windows.aspx

Edit: please read the comments of the article on my blog, you may find solutions to some of your localization problems - e.g. changing orientation resets locale, etc.

Edit 2: people have reported that sometimes the location resets to system default. Please read my post here: locale change does not affect menu  

This article, along with any associated source code and files, is licensed under The Code Project Open License (CPOL)