It is possible, and somewhat simple to implement what you are looking for. Yes, CheckedTextView is used primarily for having a single Checkable view in the row of a ListView, which controls its children's checkable states using choiceMode. However, since CheckBox does not appear to support a right-aligned checkbox on its own, and CheckedTextView is a right-aligned checkbox, it makes sense to want to use what's there.

Because ListView controls the checked state of a list item, the CheckedTextView itself does not respond to click events, and is not clickable or focusable by default. It does respond to pressed and focused states, however -- that means it can receive focus and click events, and looks correct as far as a checkbox should look. The only thing missing is that it does not toggle its checked state on click. Therefore, a quick OnClickListener that calls .toggle() will give you the end result you're looking for.

In summary, you need 3 things: clickable, focusable, and onClickListener:

    CheckedTextView chkBox = (CheckedTextView) findViewById(R.id.CheckedTextView01);
    chkBox.setOnClickListener(new View.OnClickListener() {
        public void onClick(View v)
        {
            ((CheckedTextView) v).toggle();
        }
    });

and layout file:

<CheckedTextView
    android:layout_width="wrap_content"
    android:layout_height="wrap_content"
    android:id="@+id/CheckedTextView01"
    android:checked="true"
    android:clickable="true"
    android:focusable="true"
    android:text="Label on Left Side of Checkbox."
    />

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After a little searching, it seems to me the reason that the state_checked isn't expressed pre-Honeycomb is the fact that the setActive method on View is not available before API level 11. This means that the checked state is not propagated to the child views of my layout.

THE KEY:

1. Swap the TextView for a CheckedTextView
2. Propagate the checked state from the parent view to the children

1) Was a simple switch in the XML, and for 2) I modified the code in the answer linked to by Voicu to give the following:

public class CheckableRelativeLayout extends RelativeLayout implements Checkable
{
    private boolean checked = false;

    public CheckableRelativeLayout(Context context) {
        super(context, null);
    }

    public CheckableRelativeLayout(Context context, AttributeSet attrs) {
        super(context, attrs);
    }

    private static final int[] CheckedStateSet = {
            R.attr.state_checked
    };

    @Override
    protected void dispatchSetPressed(boolean pressed)
    {
        super.dispatchSetPressed(pressed);
        setChecked(pressed);
    }

    @Override
    public void setChecked(boolean checked) {
        this.checked = checked;
        for (int index = 0; index < getChildCount(); index++)
        {
            View view = getChildAt(index);
            if (view.getClass().toString().equals(CheckedTextView.class.toString()))
            {
                CheckedTextView checkable = (CheckedTextView)view;
                checkable.setChecked(checked);
                checkable.refreshDrawableState();
            }
        }
        refreshDrawableState();
    }

    public boolean isChecked() {
        return checked;
    }

    public void toggle() {
        checked = !checked;
        refreshDrawableState();
    }

    @Override
    protected int[] onCreateDrawableState(int extraSpace) {
        final int[] drawableState = super.onCreateDrawableState(extraSpace + 1);
        if (isChecked()) {
            mergeDrawableStates(drawableState, CheckedStateSet);
        }
        return drawableState;
    }

    @Override
    public boolean performClick() {
        return super.performClick();
    }
}

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I complete such tasks by providing an @+id to the <include/> statement. So for something like your example above I would write...

  <include
  android:id="@+id/listItemMultiChoiceWrapper"
  layout="@android:layout/simple_list_item_multiple_choice" />

You could then access the text1 field by writing at your activity/fragment level (where ever you set the view containing the <include/>)

  final CheckedTextView ctv = (CheckedTextView) findViewById(id.listItemMultiChoiceWrapper).findViewById(id.text1);

If that doesn't work then check for duplicate ids confusing the situation (Lint should pick these up too).

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You can access it doing this:

CheckedTextView ctv = (CheckedTextView)findViewById(android.R.id.text1);

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The problems lie in the way you track checked items:

GridView gridView = (GridView) findViewById(R.id.gridview);
View selected =gridView.getChildAt(position);
CheckedTextView selectedCheck = (CheckedTextView)selected.findViewById(R.id.imageTick);
selectedCheck.setChecked(true);
selectedCheck.setVisibility(View.VISIBLE);

1) getChildAt will not give you the correct view if you've scrolled into content and you're indexing by adapter position. When referencing an active view in a GridView or ListView you want to do something like this:

final int index = position - gridView.getFirstVisiblePosition();
View selected = gridView.getChildAt(index);

The reason is that your GridView only keeps child views for adapter items that it is currently displaying. It may only have child views for elements 4 to 23 if elements 0 to 3 were scrolled off of the top earlier.

This is why you're getting exceptions when you do View selected =gridView.getChildAt(position); a view for that position does not actually exist when it's off-screen, so getChildAt returns null.

2) When a ListView or GridView has its content change or it otherwise needs to re-layout its child views, it does so by re-binding existing views using the convertView parameter to your adapter. Your adapter never adjusts the checked state of your item views, so a checked view can be reused for an item that should be unchecked later.

To solve this you should have your data model that your adapter presents track the checked state of your items rather than relying on the item views to do it. This means that your adapter should always verify/set the checked state of the item in getView. It may look something like this:

imageView = (ImageView) v.findViewById(R.id.image);
imageView.setImageBitmap(mThumbsIds.get().get(position));

CheckedTextView checkView = (CheckedTextView) v.findViewById(R.id.imageTick);

if (mData.isItemChecked(position)) {
    checkView.setChecked(true);
    checkView.setVisibility(View.VISIBLE);
} else {
    checkView.setVisibility(View.GONE);
}

Then when your option is selected that should change the checked state of an item, instead of the code snippet above do something like:

data.setItemChecked(position, true);
adapter.notifyDataSetChanged();

notifyDataSetChanged() will tell the GridView that it should re-bind the item views, which will have your getView method fix up the checked states properly.

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