Android 4.0.3 Platform

API Level: 15

Android 4.0.3 is an incremental release of the Android 4.x (Ice Cream Sandwich) platform family. This release includes new features for users and developers, API changes, and various bug fixes.

For developers, the Android 4.0.3 platform is available as a downloadable component for the Android SDK. The development platform includes a fully compliant Android library and system image as well as a set of emulator skins, sample applications, and more. The downloadable platform includes no external libraries.

To start developing or testing against Android 4.0.3, use the Android SDK Manager to download the platform into your SDK. For more information, see Adding SDK Components. If you are new to Android, download the SDK Starter Package first.

For a high-level overview of the new user and developer features, see the Platform Highlights.

Development Platform Revisions

The sections below provide notes about successive revisions of the Android 4.0.3 development platform for the Android SDK, as denoted by revision number. To determine what revisions you have installed in your SDK environment, refer to the "Installed Packages" listing in the Android SDK Manager.

Important: To download the new Android 4.0.x system components from the Android SDK Manager, you must first update the SDK tools to revision 14 or later and restart the Android SDK Manager. If you do not, the Android 4.0.x system components will not be available for download.

API Overview

The sections below provide a technical overview of new APIs in Android 4.0.3.

Social stream API in Contacts Provider

Applications that use social stream data such as status updates and check-ins can now sync that data with each of the user’s contacts, providing items in a stream along with photos for each.

The database table that contains an individual contact’s social stream is defined by ContactsContract.StreamItems, the Uri for which is nested within the ContactsContract.RawContacts directory to which the stream items belong. Each social stream table includes several columns for metadata about each stream item, such as an icon representing the source (an avatar), a label for the item, the primary text content, comments about the item (such as responses from other people), and more. Photos associated with a stream are stored in another table, defined by ContactsContract.StreamItemPhotos, which is available as a sub-directory of the ContactsContract.StreamItems Uri.

See ContactsContract.StreamItems and ContactsContract.StreamItemPhotos for more information.

To read or write social stream items for a contact, an application must request permission from the user by declaring <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.READ_SOCIAL_STREAM"> and/or <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.WRITE_SOCIAL_STREAM"> in their manifest files.

Calendar Provider

• Adds the class CalendarContract.Colors to represent a color table in the Calendar Provider. The class provides fields for accessing colors available for a given account. Colors are referenced by COLOR_KEY which must be unique for a given account name/type. These values can only be updated by the sync adapter.
• Adds ALLOWED_AVAILABILITY and ALLOWED_ATTENDEE_TYPES for exchange/sync support.
• Adds TYPE_RESOURCE (such as conference rooms) for attendees and AVAILABILITY_TENTATIVE, as well as EVENT_COLOR_KEY for events.

Home screen widgets

Starting from Android 4.0, home screen widgets should no longer include their own padding. Instead, the system now automatically adds padding for each widget, based the characteristics of the current screen. This leads to a more uniform, consistent presentation of widgets in a grid. To assist applications that host home screen widgets, the platform provides a new method getDefaultPaddingForWidget(). Applications can call this method to get the system-defined padding and account for it when computing the number of cells to allocate to the widget.

Spell-checking

• For apps that accessing spell-checker services, a new cancel() method cancels any pending and running spell-checker tasks in a session.
• For spell-checker services, a new suggestions flag, RESULT_ATTR_HAS_RECOMMENDED_SUGGESTIONS, lets the services distinguish higher-confidence suggestions from lower-confidence ones. For example, a spell-checker could set the flag if an input word is not in the user dictionary but has likely suggestions, or not set the flag if an input word is not in the dictionary and has suggestions that are likely to be less useful.

  Apps connected to the spell-checker can use the RESULT_ATTR_HAS_RECOMMENDED_SUGGESTIONS flag in combination with other suggestion attributes, as well as the getSuggestionsAttributes() and getSuggestionsCount() methods, to determine whether to mark input words as typos and offer suggestions.

• A new FLAG_AUTO_CORRECTION style for text spans indicates that auto correction is about to be applied to a word/text that the user is typing/composing. This type of suggestion is rendered differently, to indicate the auto correction is happening.

Bluetooth

New public methods fetchUuidsWithSdp() and getUuids() let apps determine the features (UUIDs) supported by a remote device. In the case of fetchUuidsWithSdp(), the system performs a service discovery on the remote device to get the UUIDs supported, then broadcasts the result in an ACTION_UUID intent.

UI toolkit

New methods setUserVisibleHint() and getUserVisibleHint() allow a fragment to set a hint of whether or not it is currently user-visible. The system defers the start of fragments that are not user-visible until the loaders for visible fragments have run. The visibility hint is "true" by default.

Graphics

• New method setDefaultBufferSize(int, int) in SurfaceTexture sets the default size of the image buffers. This method may be used to set the image size when producing images with Canvas (via lockCanvas(Rect)), or OpenGL ES (via an EGLSurface).
• Adds definitions for the enums of the GL_OES_EGL_image_external OpenGL ES extension — GL_REQUIRED_TEXTURE_IMAGE_UNITS_OES, GL_SAMPLER_EXTERNAL_OES, GL_TEXTURE_BINDING_EXTERNAL_OES, and GL_TEXTURE_EXTERNAL_OES.

Accessibility

• Clients of RemoteViews can now use the method setContentDescription() to set and get the content description of any View in the inflated layout.
• The methods getMaxScrollX(), getMaxScrollY(), setMaxScrollX(), and setMaxScrollY() allow apps to get and set the maximum scroll offset for an AccessibilityRecord object.
• When touch-exploration mode is enabled, a new secure setting ACCESSIBILITY_SPEAK_PASSWORD indicates whether the user requests the IME to speak text entered in password fields, even when a headset is not in use. By default, no password text is spoken unless a headset is in use.

Text-to-speech

• Adds the new method getFeatures()for querying and enabling network TTS support.
• Adds a new listener class, UtteranceProgressListener, that engines can register to receive notification of speech-synthesis errors.

Database

• A new CrossProcessCursorWrapper class lets content providers return results for a cross-process query more efficiently. The new class is a useful building block for wrapping cursors that will be sent to processes remotely. It can also transform normal Cursor objects into CrossProcessCursor objects transparently.

  The CrossProcessCursorWrapper class fixes common performance issues and bugs that applications have encountered when implementing content providers.

• The CursorWindow(java.lang.String) constructor now takes a name string as input. The system no longer distinguishes between local and remote cursor windows, so CursorWindow(boolean) is now deprecated.

Intents

Adds new categories for targeting common types of applications on the device, such as CATEGORY_APP_BROWSER, CATEGORY_APP_CALENDAR, CATEGORY_APP_MAPS, and more.

Camera

• MediaMetadataRetriever adds the new constant METADATA_KEY_LOCATION to let apps access retrieve location information for an image or video.
• CamcorderProfile adds the QVGA (320x240) resolution profiles. Quality level is represented by the QUALITY_QVGA.and QUALITY_TIME_LAPSE_QVGA constants.
• New methods setVideoStabilization(), setVideoStabilization(), and isVideoStabilizationSupported() let you check and manage video stabilization for a Camera.

Permissions

The following are new permissions:

• READ_SOCIAL_STREAM and WRITE_SOCIAL_STREAM: Allow a sync adapter to read and write social stream data to a contact in the shared Contacts Provider.

API Level

The Android 4.0.3 API is assigned an integer identifier—15—that is stored in the system itself. This identifier, called the "API level", allows the system to correctly determine whether an application is compatible with the system, prior to installing the application.

To use APIs introduced in Android 4.0.3 in your application, you need compile the application against an Android platform that supports API level 15 or higher. Depending on your needs, you might also need to add an android:minSdkVersion="15" attribute to the <uses-sdk> element.

For more information, see the API Levels document.

Built-in Applications

The system image included in the downloadable platform provides these built-in applications:

Locales

The system image included in the downloadable SDK platform provides a variety of built-in locales. In some cases, region-specific strings are available for the locales. In other cases, a default version of the language is used. The languages that are available in the Android 3.0 system image are listed below (with language_country/region locale descriptor).

Note: The Android platform may support more locales than are included in the SDK system image. All of the supported locales are available in the Android Open Source Project.

Emulator Skins

The downloadable platform includes the following emulator skins:

• QVGA (240x320, low density, small screen)
• WQVGA400 (240x400, low density, normal screen)
• WQVGA432 (240x432, low density, normal screen)
• HVGA (320x480, medium density, normal screen)
• WVGA800 (480x800, high density, normal screen)
• WVGA854 (480x854 high density, normal screen)
• WXGA720 (1280x720, extra-high density, normal screen)
• WSVGA (1024x600, medium density, large screen)
• WXGA (1280x800, medium density, xlarge screen)

To test your application on an emulator that represents the latest Android device, you can create an AVD with the new WXGA720 skin (it's an xhdpi, normal screen device). Note that the emulator currently doesn't support the new on-screen navigation bar for devices without hardware navigation buttons, so when using this skin, you must use keyboard keys Home for the Home button, ESC for the Back button, and F2 or Page-up for the Menu button.

However, due to performance issues in the emulator when running high-resolution screens such as the one for the WXGA720 skin, we recommend that you primarily use the traditional WVGA800 skin (hdpi, normal screen) to test your application.