Shape drawable in layer-list rendered incorrectly for APIs below 23

Question

Yesterday, I\'ve switched to Android Studio version 2.1.3. Today, I\'ve re-opened one of my projects and tried to add some layer-list drawables for use with an ImageVi

Answer 1

First of all, I'd like to thank @pskink for helping me to analyse the problem :)

The xml in the question worked for API level 23+, because

it is possible to set width and height right within the "item" tag

like @android developer states in this SO post

It did not work for lower versions, because there one needs to set width and height attributes for a ShapeDrawable using the size tag.

I suppose Android needs the size to figure out how to scale the drawable (-> aspect ratio!) while taking into account the insets (top, left, right, bottom).

And as is sometimes the case with malformed (for a specific API level) xml, Android failed silently and simply did not draw the shape.

So the solution is: