<uses-permission>

Google Play Filtering

In some cases, the permissions that you request through <uses-permission> can affect how your application is filtered by Google Play.

If you request a hardware-related permission — CAMERA, for example — Google Play assumes that your application requires the underlying hardware feature and filters the application from devices that do not offer it.

To control filtering, always explicitly declare hardware features in <uses-feature> elements, rather than relying on Google Play to "discover" the requirements in <uses-permission> elements. Then, if you want to disable filtering for a particular feature, you can add a android:required="false" attribute to the <uses-feature> declaration.

For a list of permissions that imply hardware features, see the documentation for the <uses-feature> element.

syntax:
<uses-permission android:name="string"
        android:maxSdkVersion="integer" />
contained in:
<manifest>
description:
Requests a permission that the application must be granted in order for it to operate correctly. Permissions are granted by the user when the application is installed, not while it's running.

For more information on permissions, see the Permissions section in the introduction and the separate Security and Permissions document. A list of permissions defined by the base platform can be found at android.Manifest.permission.

attributes:
android:name
The name of the permission. It can be a permission defined by the application with the <permission> element, a permission defined by another application, or one of the standard system permissions, such as "android.permission.CAMERA" or "android.permission.READ_CONTACTS". As these examples show, a permission name typically includes the package name as a prefix.
android:maxSdkVersion
The highest API level at which this permission should be granted to your app. Setting this attribute is useful if the permission your app requires is no longer needed beginning at a certain API level.

For example, beginning with Android 4.4 (API level 19), it's no longer necessary for your app to request the WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE permission when your app wants to write to its own application-specific directories on external storage (the directories provided by getExternalFilesDir()). However, the permission is required for API level 18 and lower. So you can declare that this permission is needed only up to API level 18 with a declaration such as this: 

<uses-permission
     android:name="android.permission.WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE"
     android:maxSdkVersion="18" />

This way, beginning with API level 19, the system will no longer grant your app the WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE permission.

introduced in:
API Level 1
see also: