Applications that do not appear in the Android Market on the Samsung Galaxy tab

Question

Some of my applications do not appear on the Android Market when viewed from the Samsung Galaxy tab.

I noticed that this happens with many other applications from other developers. If I compare “Just in” for a category in the market on the Nexus One on the Galaxy tab, a lot more apps have appeared on the Nexus One. Therefore, I do not think this is a problem specific to my applications.

What is strange is that I can’t understand what is different from my applications that do and do not appear. For example, in my Android manifest for the application that appears, I have the following:

<uses-sdk android:minSdkVersion="3" /> <!-- Prevent shoeboxing on Tab --> <supports-screens android:largeScreens="true" /> 

which shows the application in the Android Market, and the application displays a full screen in a tab.

But for some of my other applications with the same settings, I cannot browse or search to find applications listed on the market. It is as if they are simply not in the market.

FYI, I can run applications well on the AVG Galaxy Tab emulator. I also tried the min SDK of 4.

Thanks!!

Answer 1

Disables the Android Market application based on the values ​​specified in the AndroidManifest.xml file. A 7-inch tablet is a big screen. Thus, for applications that have minSDKVersion = 3, define the support-screens tag explicitly:

 <supports-screens android:largeScreens="true" android:normalScreens="true" android:anyDensity="true" /> 

http://innovator.samsungmobile.com/galaxyTab.do#03

Example 2

the manifest states <uses-sdk android:minSdkVersion="3" android:targetSdkVersion="4"> and does not include the element. Result: The Android market will show the application to users on all devices, unless other filters are applied.

http://developer.android.com/guide/appendix/market-filters.html

Answer 2

Could this be a copy protection feature in the market?

Answer 3

Apparently, Samsung devices have a cache limit of 30 MB, so they won’t allow you to download applications that exceed this size. Check the size of the APK, as this may be a problem.

Do some of your applications use telephony features? By default, Market will not offer these applications only for Wi-Fi devices unless you set this value in your AndroidManifest.xml:

  <uses-feature android:name="android.hardware.telephony" android:required="false"/> 

Check out my answer here for more info.

You will need to make sure that your code handles gracefully when these functions are not available.