Question

I recently finished my first Android application and will submit it to market in a couple of days. I was looking into the ways of supporting all screens and reaching as many people as I can. I already prepared all graphics for all screens and tested them in emulator and they all look great but I have not put any addition code in the manifest to support all the screens.

I encountered many topics talking about using following code:

<supports-screens android:smallScreens="true"
                  android:normalScreens="true"
                  android:largeScreens="true"
                  android:xlargeScreens="true" />

but I do not want to use it because my minSdkVersion is 8 and I need to prepare a different apk for xlargeScreens. I simply do not want to do it.

My question is: If I do not use the above code in the manifest file at all will my application be visible to all devices?

Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

if you do not want xlarge then

<supports-screens android:smallScreens="true"
                  android:normalScreens="true"
                  android:largeScreens="true"
                  android:xlargeScreens="false" />

if you do not use this at all then some default values will be set for you.

By default, your application will not support small screens, will support
normal screens, and may support large and extra-large screens via some
automated conversion code built into Android.

But it is best to be explicit so you should definitely add supports-screens at you manifest

Note: That the defaults depends on the build engine you use, so if you use something else than eclipse, ant or maven and you live supports-screens undefined in you manifest the defaults can be different then this

<supports-screens android:smallScreens="false"
                  android:normalScreens="true"
                  android:largeScreens="true"
                  android:xlargeScreens="false" />