An example of Android's Manifest Merging

October 03, 2015 | 1 Minute Read

Android Studio (and the Android Gradle plugin) make our lives as Android developers much easier. A great feature of this tool suite is Manifest Merging. Most of the time it isn't something you ever need to fiddle with. Libraries with permissions can include necessary permissions, debug builds can include a debug Activity, etc. This post is about one case where the Merger must be told how to correct itself.

The Setup

Let's have a project with two flavors, internal and production, similar to the fantasic U2020 sample. An application using Context.getExternalFilesDir() pre KitKat (API 19) requires android.permission.WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE, but can eliminate the app from need this permission with the maxSdkVersion attribute.

src/main/AndroidManifest.xml

<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE"
        android:maxSdkVersion="18"/>

Suppose inside the internal flavor we have functionality that requires the external storage permission. LeakCanary (as of 1.4-SNAPSHOT) and bug reporting library Telescope (1.4.0 also) both use external storage for storing heap dumps and screenshots respectively.

What do we add to src/internal/AndroidManifest.xml to require the permission for all SDK versions? If we add the permission without the maxSdkVersion attribute everything will continue to build, but we won't get the permission. The Android docs again come in handy in describing the merge order for attributes. There are low priority and high priority status for elements. So a set attribute, in our case the maxSdkVersion is given a high priority, and listing the same permission in the internal flavor manifest with no maxSdkVersion is given a low priority.

If we set the maxSdkVersion to the latest SDK available, say android:maxSdkVersion="23", there will be two high priority elements and that results in a merge conflict. Studio will try giving a hint that you can use tools:replace and have the internal flavor replace the attribute. But this is a code smell! Everytime the SDK updates we'd have to make sure we change this number, the best option is to simply remove the attribute.

src/internal/AndroidManifest.xml

<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE"
        tools:remove="android:maxSdkVersion"/>