Question

I’m trying to scale my app to all screen sizes and I read that if I compile the app against android 3.2 then I’ll be able to use the new qualifiers etc….But my question is – if I do compile it at this version, does that mean that mobile phones that have a lesser platform won’t be able to download or run the app? Will I be excluding the majority of phones for the sake of including a very small percentage of phones that the tablets currently comprise?

Answer 1

You may compile your app using the newest SDK version of Android, or in your case 3.2, and the app should continue to run on older versions of Android. The only thing to be careful of here is to ensure that the API methods you use are still compatible with the older versions. These newer qualifiers that you mention would not be allowed for the older versions of your app, but there are some compatibility libraries that you may use for them found here:

http://developer.android.com/tools/extras/support-library.html

To ensure that your app is compatible with older versions of Android, you can install the newest ADT and also run Android Lint. Lint will point out functions that may not be available on different versions of Android, based on your manifest file. Your manifest file allows you to determine the minimum version of android that can use your app, as well as the ideal version of Android that your app is made for. Please refer to the following link for more details about versioning your app, and some backwards compatibility:

http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/manifest/uses-sdk-element.html