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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-27T21:38:15+00:00

I’ve been trying to figure this out for a little while and I’m sure

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I’ve been trying to figure this out for a little while and I’m sure I’ve seen something on this before either on the Android dev blog or SO but it’s fleeing me currently. I was wondering the best way to target different API levels with a single APK, if possible.

For example, I would like to be able to take advantage of the new Ice Cream Sandwich features and UI patterns but also want to support Gingerbread and below. Would the best solution be to make different projects with a similar code base but rewriting specific features to use the specific features and posting multiple APKs in the Market or could I use a form of reflection to scale back?

Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks! Mainly, I would like to know if multiple APKs are necessarily bad or if I’d be better off with a single APK.

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  1. Editorial Team

    This is the canonical blog post for backwards compatibility: http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2009/04/backward-compatibility-for-android.html

    ICS -> Gingerbread can get complicated if you’re using custom themes or want to use fragments.

    I’m in the process of writing an article for developer.android.com that goes into more detail about this, but the short version is:

    • Create a res/values-v11 and a res/values folder. The v11 folder should hold themes which inherit from android.theme.Holo and the non-v11 folder should hold themes which inherit from android.theme. If you don’t use custom themes, you can skip this step — setting targetSdkLevel >= 11 will do all the magic for you.

    • Use the support package to provide Fragment/Loader support on pre-Honeycomb devices: http://developer.android.com/sdk/compatibility-library.html

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