Hardware Acceleration stops working on new APIs

Question

I need to enable hardware acceleration on one of my WebViews. So far, I've found out that if I build my project with a target API of 11 or 13 (Android 3.0 and 3.2, respectively), hardware acceleration gets enabled and everything's fine. But the weird part is that when I build my project with API 17 or 18, all my efforts to turn on hardware acceleration get ignored for some reason.

So far I've tried:

1) Setting android:hardwareAccelerated="true" in my tag in the manifest

2) Same, but for the activity containing the WebView

3) The following code in my Activity's onCreate (before setting content view):

getWindow().setFlags(WindowManager.LayoutParams.FLAG_HARDWARE_ACCELERATED, WindowManager.LayoutParams.FLAG_HARDWARE_ACCELERATED);

4) The same, but using getWindow().addFlags(WindowManager.LayoutParams.FLAG_HARDWARE_ACCELERATED);

In all cases, webView.isHardwareAccelerated() returns false, even when it's working.

Please help, it would be pretty lame to be stuck on API 13 because of this...

Answer 1

Tested on API 18:

Perform the check by posting a Runnable to the WebView:

WebView webView = (WebView) findViewById(R.id.webview_id);

// Shows: "Is hardware accelerated? false"
// Toast.makeText(YourActivity.this, "Is hardware accelerated? " + 
                                             // webView.isHardwareAccelerated(),
                                                 // Toast.LENGTH_LONG).show();

webView.post(new Runnable() {

    @Override
    public void run() {
        Shows: "Is hardware accelerated? true"
        Toast.makeText(YourActivity.this, "Is hardware accelerated? " + 
                                              webView.isHardwareAccelerated(),
                                                  Toast.LENGTH_LONG).show();

        if (webView.isHardwareAccelerated()) {
            // isAccelerated();
        } else {
            // isNotAccelerated();
        }
    }
});

From resource page on Hardware Acceleration:

Hardware acceleration is enabled by default if your Target API level is >=14, but can also be explicitly enabled.

If the image you are displaying is still pixelated, try setting:

webView.setLayerType(View.LAYER_TYPE_SOFTWARE, null);

and see if pixelation of the image gets better.

Consider reading the resource page on Hardware Acceleration.