I created a design in the abstract designer and it worked fine on my smartphone and on the basic emulator.
But now I have the UI cloud version of the program and my design looks completely off on all of those devices. It doesn't look at all like the abstract designer.
This is discouraging!
Am I right to assume that we must always write a full designer code even for simple designs?
Apart from applying autoScaleAll, I think there is no need for coding everything, at least for simple designs. I suggest you read (if not already did so) Erel's and Klaus' tutorials upon handling different size screens.
Also have a look at Klaus's fine 'Scale Code module' the advantage with this is it works with both designer and code generated views and it can scales in both the x and y planes differently thereby corrects for different ratio phones.
Thanks Edward... I didn't know about this one (go Klaus!)
My feeling now is that pretty much anything, no matter how simple, is going to require some variant coding if we expect our apps to appear properly across multiple devices.