The manifest file:Android

The manifest file:Android
Before Android can start an application component, it must learn that the component exists. Therefore, applications declare their components in a manifest file that's bundled into the Android package, the .apk file that also holds the application's code, files, and resources.

The manifest is a structured XML file and is always named AndroidManifest.xml for all applications. It does a number of things in addition to declaring the application's components, such as naming any libraries the application needs to be linked against (besides the default Android library) and identifying any permissions the application expects to be granted.

But the principal task of the manifest is to inform Android about the application's components. For example, an activity might be declared as follows:



android:icon="@drawable/small_pic.png"
android:label="@string/freneticLabel"
. . . >

. . .


The name attribute of the element names the Activity subclass that implements the activity. The icon and label attributes point to resource files containing an icon and label that can be displayed to users to represent the activity.

The other components are declared in a similar way — elements for services, elements for broadcast receivers, and elements for content providers. Activities, services, and content providers that are not declared in the manifest are not visible to the system and are consequently never run. However, broadcast receivers can either be declared in the manifest, or they can be created dynamically in code (as BroadcastReceiver objects) and registered with the system by calling Context.registerReceiver().