Can the Android layout folder contain subfolders?

You CAN do this with gradle. I’ve made a demo project showing how.

The trick is to use gradle’s ability to merge multiple resource folders, and set the res folder as well as the nested subfolders in the sourceSets block.

The quirk is that you can’t declare a container resource folder before you declare that folder’s child resource folders.

Below is the sourceSets block from the build.gradle file from the demo. Notice that the subfolders are declared first.

sourceSets {
    main {
        res.srcDirs =
        [
                'src/main/res/layouts/layouts_category2',
                'src/main/res/layouts',
                'src/main/res'
        ]
    }
}

Also, the direct parent of your actual resource files (pngs, xml layouts, etc..) does still need to correspond with the specification.