Question

What I’ve read seems to indicate that the only way to do it is to use unofficial APIs that are being locked down in Cupcake (1.5). Is this true?

Answer 1

It looks like the answer is “not until cupcake”.

From Android Developers Blog: Future-Proofing Your Apps:

Technique to Avoid, #1: Using Internal APIs

Even though we’ve always strongly
advised against doing so, some
developers have chosen to use
unsupported or internal APIs. For
instance, many developers are using
the internal brightness control and
bluetooth toggle APIs that were
present in 1.0 and 1.1. A bug — which
is now fixed in Android 1.5 — allowed
apps to use those APIs without
requesting permission. As a result,
apps that use those APIs will break on
1.5. There are other changes to unsupported APIs in 1.5 besides these,
so if you’ve used internal APIs in
your apps, you need to update your
apps to stop doing so. Even if they
don’t break on Android 1.5, there’s a
good chance they will on some later
version. (There’s some good news,
though: because “flashlight” apps are
so popular, we’ve added the
“screenBrightness” field on the
WindowManager.LayoutParams class just
for that use case.)