Date: December 2009
API Level: 6
Android 2.0.1 is a minor platform release deployable to Android-powered handsets starting in December 2009. This release includes minor API changes, bug fixes and framework behavioral changes. For information on changes and fixes, see the Framework API section.
For developers, the Android 2.0.1 platform is available as a downloadable component for the Android SDK. The downloadable 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 get started developing or testing against the Android 2.0.1 platform, use the Android SDK and AVD Manager tool to download the platform into your Android 1.6 or later SDK. For more information, see Adding SDK Components.
For a list of new user features and platform highlights, see the Android 2.0 Platform Highlights document.
The system image included in the downloadable platform provides these built-in applications:
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New with 2.0.1 The Dev Tools app now includes a "Sync Tester" application to provide quick and easy testing of third-party sync adapters.
The system image included in the downloadable 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 2.0.1 system image are listed below (with language_country/region locale descriptor).
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Localized UI strings match the locales that are accessible through Settings.
The downloadable platform includes a set of emulator skins that you can use for modeling your application in different screen sizes and resolutions. The emulator skins are:
For more information about how to develop an application that displays and functions properly on all Android-powered devices, see Supporting Multiple Screens.
The sections below provide information about new developer features offered by the downloadable Android 2.0 platform component.
zipalign optimization. For more information, see Signing Your Applications.The sections below provide information about changes made to the application framework API provided by the Android 2.0.1 platform. Note, however, that Android 2.0.1 is a minor release to Android 2.0, so for more information about the changes made to in Android 2.0, please refer to the Android 2.0 version notes.
The Android 2.0.1 platform delivers an updated version of the framework API. The Android 2.0.1 API is assigned an integer identifier — 6 — 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 2.0.1 in your application, you need to
set the proper value, "6", in the attributes of the <uses-sdk>
element in your application's manifest.
For more information about how to use API Level, see the API Levels document.
The following is a summary of changes to the framework APIs.
quickContactBadgeStyle* attributes that let
applications apply necessary styles to the QuickContactBadge widget.ACTION_CONFIGURATION_CHANGED broadcast when declared as
a filter in the manifest. To receive this broadcast, an application must
do so from the application at run-time, with registerReceiver(BroadcastReceiver, IntentFilter).The following is a summary of changes that affect the behavior of some framework APIs but do not add or remove API functionality.
Changes to the values returned by ACTION_REQUEST_ENABLE and
ACTION_REQUEST_DISCOVERABLE:
ACTION_REQUEST_ENABLE now
returns RESULT_OK if Bluetooth was successfully
enabled and RESULT_CANCELED if the user rejected
the request to enable Bluetooth, rather than 0 and -1 (or -2),
respectively.ACTION_REQUEST_DISCOVERABLE
now returns RESULT_CANCELED if the user rejected
the request to enable discoverability or if Bluetooth is not enabled, rather
than -1 and -2, respectively.The ACTION_INSERT Intent now returns RESULT_CANCELED in cases where the contact was not
persisted (for example, if the save was trimmed to a no-op).
The following is a summary of bug fixes that affect some framework APIs.
The framework now correctly selects application resources in project
folders that use the API Level qualifier. For example, drawable-v4/ is a
folder of drawable resources for API Level 4 (or higher) devices. This version
matching did not work properly and has been fixed.
The ACTION_INSERT Intent now returns the
appropriate kind of URI when the request is made using the (now
deprecated) Contacts APIs.
getCallingPackage() now properly reports the
package name, rather than the process name.For a detailed view of API changes in Android 2.0.1 (API Level 6), as compared to API Level 5, see the API Differences Report. There are very few API changes in API Level 6, so you might also be interested in reviewing the API differences between 4 and 5.