android ConstraintLayout does not allow negative margins

Support for setting negative margin in a ConstraintLayout has been added in ConstraintLayout 2.1.0 alpha 2 on the 17th of December 2020.

You can update to it by setting the dependency to:

implementation 'androidx.constraintlayout:constraintlayout:2.1.0-alpha2'

The full changelog is available here: https://androidstudio.googleblog.com/2020/12/constraintlayout-210-alpha-2.html which includes:

ConstraintLayout

• supports negative margins for constraints

This means that now you can do things such as android:layout_marginTop="-25dp", which you couldn't do before!

android:translationX="-10dp"
android:translationY="-10dp"

This answer is now obsolete. See the accepted answer for an update.

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Here is a blog posting that discusses negative margins in ConstraintLayout.

Using Spaces for negative margins

A view in a ConstraintLayout cannot have negative margins (it’s not supported). However, with an easy trick you can have similar functionality by inserting a Space (which is essentially an empty View) and setting its size to the margin you want.

You can use a View to hold a fixed value like 30dp like below:

 <com.mapbox.mapboxsdk.maps.MapView
    android:id="@+id/mapView"
    android:layout_width="0dp"
    android:layout_height="0dp"
    android:layout_marginTop="45dp"
    app:layout_constraintBottom_toBottomOf="@id/space"
    app:layout_constraintLeft_toLeftOf="parent"
    app:layout_constraintRight_toRightOf="parent"
    app:layout_constraintTop_toTopOf="parent"
    app:mapbox_uiRotateGestures="false" />

<View
    android:id="@+id/space"
    android:layout_width="match_parent"
    android:layout_height="30dp"
    app:layout_constraintTop_toBottomOf="parent" />