I have an application that has support for the Portuguese language, both for Portugal and Brazil regions. I have created a values-pt (containing the Portugal translation) and values-pt-rBR (containing the Brazilian translation). I then tried changing the application language to Potuguese (Portugal) and the application language changes correctly. When I set it to Portuguese (Brazilian) it does not. I tried changing the phone default language to Portuguese (Brazilian) and it still does not work. It works for Portuguese (Portugal) in both cases (programmatically and system). Does anyone know what the problem is? The code for programmatically changing the application's locale is the following:
Locale locale = new Locale(strLocale);
Locale.setDefault(locale);
config.locale = locale;
context.getResources().updateConfiguration(config, context.getResources().getDisplayMetrics());
and strLocale is set to "pt" or "pt_BR" for Portugal and Brazil language respectively.
I assume you're targeting Android OS > 2.2, because both Portuguese languages are supported by Android starting at version 2.3+.
I tested it on the emulator, by swapping language & keyboard and having only 1 string different: app_name, so it appeared in application title and it worked just fine.
The only difference is that I named Portugal region values-pt-rPT insead of values-pt.
I didn't test on the fly-relocalization, but I guess it works as well.
I think that when you work with regions, you MUST specify a region for every localization (i.e. fr-rFR for France and fr-rCA for Canada) and can't use the default (pt in your case, or fr in my second example).
This link illustrates the whole thing more deeply.
[EDIT]
When creating a new locale by code, try:
final Locale myLocale = new Locale("pt", "PT");
and
final Locale myLocale = new Locale("pt", "BR");
Here's another page from the reference site.