Auto Scale TextView Text to Fit within Bounds

I'm looking for an optimal way to resize wrapping text in a TextView so that it will fit within its getHeight and getWidth bounds. I'm not simply looking for a way to wrap the text- I want to make sure it both wraps and is small enough to fit entirely on the screen.

I've seen a few cases on StackOverflow where auto resizing was needed, but they are either very special cases with hack solutions, have no solution, or involve re-drawing the TextView recursively until it is small enough (which is memory intense and forces the user to watch the text shrink step-by-step with every recursion).

But I'm sure somebody out there has found a good solution that doesn't involve what I'm doing: writing several heavy routines that parse and measure the text, resize the text, and repeat until a suitably small size has been found.

What routines does TextView use to wrap the text? Couldn't those be somehow used to predict whether text will be small enough?

tl;dr: is there a best-practice way to auto-resize a TextView to fit, wrapped, in its getHeight and getWidth bounds?

Solution

From June 2018 Android officially started supporting this feature for Android 4.0 (API level 14) and higher.
Check it out at: Autosizing TextViews

With Android 8.0 (API level 26) and higher:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<TextView
    android:layout_width="match_parent"
    android:layout_height="200dp"
    android:autoSizeTextType="uniform"
    android:autoSizeMinTextSize="12sp"
    android:autoSizeMaxTextSize="100sp"
    android:autoSizeStepGranularity="2sp" />

Programmatically:

setAutoSizeTextTypeUniformWithConfiguration(int autoSizeMinTextSize, int autoSizeMaxTextSize, 
        int autoSizeStepGranularity, int unit)

textView.setAutoSizeTextTypeUniformWithConfiguration(
                1, 17, 1, TypedValue.COMPLEX_UNIT_DIP);

Android versions prior to Android 8.0 (API level 26):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<LinearLayout
    xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
    xmlns:app="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res-auto"
    android:layout_width="match_parent"
    android:layout_height="match_parent">

  <TextView
      android:layout_width="match_parent"
      android:layout_height="200dp"
      app:autoSizeTextType="uniform"
      app:autoSizeMinTextSize="12sp"
      app:autoSizeMaxTextSize="100sp"
      app:autoSizeStepGranularity="2sp" />

</LinearLayout>

Programmatically:

TextViewCompat.setAutoSizeTextTypeUniformWithConfiguration(
TextView textView, int autoSizeMinTextSize, int autoSizeMaxTextSize, int autoSizeStepGranularity, int unit) 

TextViewCompat.setAutoSizeTextTypeUniformWithConfiguration(textView, 1, 17, 1,
TypedValue.COMPLEX_UNIT_DIP);

Attention: TextView must have layout_width="match_parent" or absolute size!