The devices running FroYo through Jellybean have hardware “menu” buttons, which brings up the in-app menu that provides access to the app settings. And the devices running Pie do not have any buttons at all, but here the app gives me a 3-dot overflow menu that allows similar access to the app settings. And the game runs perfectly on all these devices.
But for the devices running Oreo, (there are 2 of these, both are Samsung S7s from different carriers), the only button on the device is a “home” button. However, unlike the Pie devices, there is no 3-dot overflow menu here, so I have no way to access the app settings. Apart from this issue, the app otherwise runs perfectly here too.
Has anyone seen something similar? Is there any way I can get the 3-dot overflow menu to appear? Or any other way to access the app settings?
Long press Home gets me a popup “Assistant Jammer has blocked a Voice Interaction” (this is probably because I have PilferShushJammer installed).
Long press Recents (this is not a physical button like Home is, but just the sometimes-illuminated area of the screen similar to the Back key) gets me a popup “Can’t use this app in Multi window view”. This seems like a more plausible place to want the menu key anyway since the default system function of this key is not useful for this app.
I poked through the android settings but could not find anything that seemed useful.
Well, that seems to do something… although it took some tinkering to figure out that the navigation item “Open Menu” was not what I wanted, it needed to be “Input KEYCODE_MENU”. After that it did bring up the needed menu. Just for jollies I also threw in a constraint that Mahjong Builder had to be in the foreground.
It does seem to raise a somewhat different issue though… it needs to disable my default keyboard that should be used for most other apps. I end up needing to toggle between that and the Key Mapper Basic Input Method keyboard an awful lot. While I can cope with this for my own devices (since I don’t actually need to fiddle with the settings very often once they are initially set up), it will be difficult to explain to the elderly relative who owns one of these devices.
There were some changes in Android that dropped support for the three dot “…” options menu that used to be displayed on the system bar next to the App Overview/Recents button.
If I recall correctly the three dot “…” options menu is only available up to Android 2 (API 10 - aka Gingerbread_MR1). If the target API level is set higher than 10 then the three dot “…” menu is unavailable.
Further I’ve found that Android 10 (API 29 - aka Quince Tart) and higher devices do not display the three dot “…” options menu regardless of the app target API level. If you’ve noted that the three dot "…’ options menu is not displayed on Android 8.0 (API 26 - aka Oreo) and higher then perhaps this support was dropped earlier.
From looking at the source code file AndroidManifest.xml it appears that Mahjongg Builder targeted android:minSdkVersion=“1” which is API 1.
It’s not missing on “and higher” (or at least not any devices that I own), as noted the Pie devices do show the 3dot menu correctly. It is only those Oreo devices having the issue. It might not even be just Oreo, but specifically Samsungs, I do not have any non-Samsung Oreo devices to test with.
It isn’t, according to default.properties the target API is 4 (ie, 1.6 Donut), the minimum API from AndroidManifest.xml is 1 (all the way back to the very first release before the dessert names).
I have seen some other posts that suggest the lines android:theme="@android:style/Theme.NoTitleBar"
in the activity blocks in AndroidManifest.xml may be the culprit; alternatives for that might not have been widely known so long ago. But I am not able to recompile the app, and the original author moved on a long time ago, so that is not likely to change.
Perhaps I am mistaken and we might be discussing two different three dot “…” options menus.
On my Android 10 phone (and later when upgraded to Android 11,) the three dot “…” options menu does not display. My reference case is SolitaireCG v3.4.1 and lower as I am the maintainer of that software.
