Testing locale-specific behavior on 4.2+ devices

Question

Now that Google has broken android.permission.CHANGE_CONFIGURATION, how are developers and QA techs supposed to test locale-specific behavior?

My 4.4 device offers English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. I've done some testing in Arabic on older devices, and I'm sure I'll run into another scenario like that sooner or later.

Juuso Ohtonen · Accepted Answer · 2015-01-07T07:21:50.563

2

You can allow locale changing also on newer (4.2+) devices: adb shell pm grant <your_app_package_name> android.permission.CHANGE_CONFIGURATION

I could find no documentation, but there are a couple of issues filed to Google:

https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=56519 (closed without explanation)

Changing the system language via ActivityManagers updateConfiguration() requires the permission android.permission.CHANGE_CONFIGURATION.
Unfortunatelly, the protectionLevel of that permission has changed from 1 ("dangerous", up to Android 4.1) to 0x12 ("signature | system", in Android 4.2).

https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=92866

edited Jan 07 '15 at 07:21

answered Jan 07 '15 at 06:47

Juuso Ohtonen

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I'll accept this answer if you define "newer devices" and provide a link to documentation. – Kevin Krumwiede Jan 07 '15 at 07:03
Heh, that second issue was created by me. – Kevin Krumwiede Jan 16 '15 at 20:02

Testing locale-specific behavior on 4.2+ devices

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