Custom Application class in library project

Question

I have an android library project being referenced by an application project. The library project has a custom class extending the base Application class where I have done some initializations. Now the problem is that this class doesn't get called automatically even though I have registered it correctly in the manifest file of the library project. I even tried to call it using

 MyApplication app = new MyApplication();
 app.onCreate();

But this gives me a null pointer exception.

What I think is that application class does not get called in the library project automatically. If this is true then what's a better way to call it manually from with in the library project?

Answer 1

This is a limitation of Android library projects. The AndroidManifest.xml of a library project is effectively ignored in a project that uses that library.

Thus you need to put any <activity>, <service>, and other such tags in the end application's manifest.

Note: While the above was true in 2013 (and is still true if you are using Ant as your build system), the Android Gradle plugin will merge manifests from AAR libraries into your manifest automatically.