Romain Guy

ScrollView is one of Android’s most commonly used widget and is also one of the easiest to use. When something is too big to fit on screen, drop it inside a ScrollView and you’re done. You can’t even get it wrong since a ScrollView accepts only one child at a time. There is, however, one use case a bit trickier to get right; unless you’ve carefully read the documentation.

Let’s imagine that your application needs to display a piece of text and a couple of buttons. The length of the text can vary and be longer or shorter than the screen. You want to put the text inside a scroll view and you want the buttons to scroll along with the text, probably to encourage the user to read the text before clicking any of the button. Depending on the length of the text, your application would look like one of the following screenshots:

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