Android Tutorial

By : Ketan Bhimani

108 

updates, your application would cease to work (and appear) on

phones where it had functioned perfectly, which might “upset” your

users and result in bad ratings on your market of choice.

The short answer: Use maxSdkVersion only when absolutely

necessary and when you understand the risks associated with its

use.

Enforcing Application Platform Requirements

Android devices have different hardware and software

configurations. Some devices have built-in keyboards and others

rely upon the software keyboard. Similarly, certain Android devices

support the latest 3-D graphics libraries and others provide little or

no graphics support. The Android manifest file has several

informational tags for flagging the system features and hardware

configurations supported or required by an Android application.

Specifying Supported Input Methods

The <uses-configuration> tag can be used to specify which input

methods the application supports. There are different configuration

attributes for five-way navigation, the hardware keyboard and

keyboard types; navigation devices such as the directional pad,

trackball, and wheel; and touch screen settings.

There is no “OR” support within a given attribute. If an application

supports multiple input configurations, there must be multiple

<uses-configuration> tags—one for each complete configuration

supported.

For example, if your application requires a physical keyboard and

touch screen input using a finger or a stylus, you need to define