I have a working solution, which, frankly, I think it is too deep to get such a simple result. But here it is:
What exactly is going on:
By opening the Dialog layout with the Hierarchy Viewer , I was able to examine the entire AlertDialog layout and what exactly was happening: 
The blue icon is all parts of a high level ( Window , frames for the Dialog visual style, etc.) and from the end of the blue down, where are the components for the AlertDialog ( red = name, yellow = scroll delay, possibly for the AlertDialog s list, green = Dialog , i.e. custom view, orange =).
From here it is clear that the 7-view path (from the beginning of blue to the end of green ) was incorrect WRAP_CONTENT . Looking at the LayoutParams.width each View , it turned out that all were given LayoutParams.width = MATCH_PARENT and somewhere (I think at the top) the size was set. Therefore, if you follow this tree, it is clear that your custom View at the bottom of the tree will never affect the size of the Dialog .
So what were the existing solutions?
- Both coding approaches mentioned in my question just got the top
View and modified its LayoutParams . Obviously, with all View objects in the tree corresponding to the parent element, if the top level is set to static size, the whole Dialog will resize. But if the top level is set to WRAP_CONTENT , all other View objects in the tree are still looking at the tree at “MATCH the PARENT”, and not looking down at the tree to “WRAP them CONTENT”.
How to solve a problem:
Wrong, change the LayoutParams.width all View objects in the impact path to WRAP_CONTENT .
I found that this can only be done AFTER onStart life cycle DialogFragment . Thus, onStart is implemented as:
@Override public void onStart() {
Then a function to properly modify the hierarchy of View LayoutParams :
protected void forceWrapContent(View v) {
And here is the working result: 
This confuses me why the whole Dialog would not want to be WRAP_CONTENT with an explicit set of minWidth to handle all cases that match the default size, but I'm sure there is a good reason for this as it was (it would be interesting to hear).