Android: Application being forced to use hardware acceleration?

Question

My app uses Canvas methods which are not supported by hardware acceleration (clipPath, drawPicture), so I do not enable hardware accelaration. However, I started getting crash reports with exceptions like: android.view.GLES20Canvas.drawPicture(GLES20Canvas.java:895).

In investigating this, it seems that some devices have an option to force hardware acceleration in settings: "force gpu rendering, use 2d harware acceleartion in applciations". So, I added <application android:hardwareAccelerated="false"> to my manifest.xml, but still get the crash when the "force gpu rendering" setting is checked.

So, is there anyway to prevent my application from being forced to use hardware acceleration?

Answer 1

Disable it for the views using those operations with the 'View Level' option in the dev guide - I expect that other options will be foiled by how the setting is forced on your app.

myView.setLayerType(View.LAYER_TYPE_SOFTWARE, null);

Failing that, the link describes how you can detect hardware acceleration, to complain about it.

View.isHardwareAccelerated() returns true if the View is attached to a hardware accelerated window.

Canvas.isHardwareAccelerated() returns true if the Canvas is hardware accelerated