AndroidManifest.xml file in android

The AndroidManifest.xml file contains information of your package, including components of the application such as activities, services, broadcast receivers, content providers etc.

It performs some other tasks also:

• It is responsible to protect the application to access any protected parts by providing the permissions.
• It also declares the android api that the application is going to use.
• It lists the instrumentation classes. The instrumentation classes provides profiling and other informations. These informations are removed just before the application is published etc.

This is the required xml file for all the android application and located inside the root directory.

A simple AndroidManifest.xml file looks like this:

Elements of the AndroidManifest.xml file

The elements used in the above xml file are described below.

<manifest>

manifest is the root element of the AndroidManifest.xml file. It has package attribute that describes the package name of the activity class.

<application>

application is the subelement of the manifest. It includes the namespace declaration. This element contains several subelements that declares the application component such as activity etc.

The commonly used attributes are of this element are icon, label, theme etc.

android:icon represents the icon for all the android application components.

android:label works as the default label for all the application components.

android:theme represents a common theme for all the android activities.

<activity>

activity is the subelement of application and represents an activity that must be defined in the AndroidManifest.xml file. It has many attributes such as label, name, theme, launchMode etc.

android:label represents a label i.e. displayed on the screen.

android:name represents a name for the activity class. It is required attribute.

<intent-filter>

intent-filter is the sub-element of activity that describes the type of intent to which activity, service or broadcast receiver can respond to.

<action>

It adds an action for the intent-filter. The intent-filter must have at least one action element.

<category>

It adds a category name to an intent-filter.