Handling the missing MENU button in new versions of Android (3.x and up)

Question

I'm a fan of the menu button as used in Android <3.0, as it was very useful for my game apps - it allowed me to take important but gameplay irrelevant functionality (saving game, reference info links) and place it somewhere where it did not clutter up the main game interface, but was still easily accessible (the options menu).

This use of keys became a problem with 3.0, because it removed the MENU button and substituted it with the Action Bar. The Action bar is really not suitable for a game which likes to run full-screen, so that was a real pain. No action bar - no access to the options menu. However, I could sort of ignore it for a while, since I didn't have that many users on tablets and lacked the time to test this.

However, ICS makes this a serious issue, since the MENU button is obviously not coming back. Now I don't only have to deal with this problems on tablets, but on phones as well.

My initial solution to this problem has been to simply place a soft button in my GUI to replace the hard MENU button

this.openOptionsMenu(); 

And everything is back to working perfectly in ICS.

However, this does not work on Honeycomb. Calling openOptionsMenu does absolutely nothing if you do not have the ActionBar visible.

Any thoughts on how to deal with this?

• I suppose I could always go back to using TargetSDK < 11 (thereby forcing the ActionBar to appear on tablets), but as far as I can see this is merely pushing the problem into the future, which I would prefer not to do.

• Drop the Options Menu entirely, and go over to only using Context Menus? [Clarification: By this I mean that instead of opening an options menu - I only use context menus since - at least for now - these work on all devices].

Interested in hearing what others who have had similar issues with the whole Options Menu/ActionBar mess decided to do.

Answer 1

Let me share another scenario where Menu Button becomes critical even though it is not a game.

I have app implement its own tool bars which behave to some extent like ActionBar. Well I did that coz my app was released with 1.5 sdk. At that time there is no such concept. And to accomodate for my toolbars i hide the default title bar. But some of the actions are done through Menu functionality.

Now since in Galaxy Nexus there is no Menu button if you are not using ActionBar and that is hurting me because my app still supports 1.5.

Well there are various work arounds, but none is easy.

That said, the only work around I come up with is to give user all options on my toolbar, so there is no need for Menu at all. I can do this because i only have two actions which are not part of the toolbar.

In your situation, context menu on a button is not a bad soln in a game as game will have only one context in which it is running as compared to having context menu on list items where every item is a different context.

BTW if openOptionsMenu works on ICS and you can ditch HoneyComb after a while (even now the userbase is too low) then try giving both menus based on the version.

EDIT: Well there is another way also to get the MENU s/w button in the below navigation bar. Just set the targetSdkVersion to less than 11. For more details pls read the whole soln.