The Common Mistake That Prevents Your App from Uploading to Playstore: android:exported

Playstore needs your app manifest to have android:exported set to true (android:exported="true") for the following reasons :

- To ensure that your app is compatible with Android 12 and higher, which requires an explicit value for android:exported when the corresponding component has an intent filter defined¹.

- To avoid manifest merger errors that may occur when you upgrade to Android 12 or higher.

- To prevent accidental exposure of internal app components that may lead to security risks such as denial of service attacks, data leakage, or code execution. 

- To make your app's component visibility clear and consistent across different devices and Android versions.

Solution :

To set the android:exported attribute to true for an Android component in your Android app's manifest file, you should include it as an attribute within the component's declaration. Here's how you can do it for different components in your manifest file :

1. For an Activity:

<activity

    android:name=".YourActivityName"

    android:exported="true">

    <!-- Other activity attributes -->

</activity>

2. For a Service:

<service

    android:name=".YourServiceName"

    android:exported="true">

    <!-- Other service attributes -->

</service>

3. BroadcastReceiver:

<receiver android:name=".YourReceiverName" android:exported="true"> <!-- Other receiver attributes --> </receiver>

4. For a Content Provider:

<provider android:name=".YourProviderName" android:exported="true"> <!-- Other provider attributes --> </provider>

Make sure to replace .YourActivityName, .YourServiceName, .YourReceiverName and .YourProviderName with the actual names of your components. Setting android:exported="true" means that the component can be accessed by other apps or components outside of your app, also approved by google play console.

NB : It`s not compulsory to use all the codes provided above in your app if you are not using their component(s) or feature(s) in your app but for the number 1 code (For an Activity), it is compulsory to use because at least you will have one activity that will be running in your app. If you are using android studio on your pc, all these codes are useless, because it will automatically add them to your app manifest without your effort but I do not know other coding platforms such as Aide, CodeAssist etc.

I hope you learnt something from this article.

Thanks for reading...