Android :: What Does TargetSdkVersion Do

What does targetSdkVersion do?

There isn't much detail on what targetSdkVersion actually does.

I've read:[url]

An integer designating the API Level that the application is targetting.

With this attribute set, the application says that it is able to run on older versions (down to minSdkVersion), but was explicitly tested to work with the version specified here. Specifying this target version allows the platform to disable compatibility settings that are not required for the target version (which may otherwise be turned on in order to maintain forward-compatibility) or enable newer features that are not available to older applications. This does not mean that you can program different features for different versions of the platform—it simply informs the platform that you have tested against the target version and the platform should not perform any extra work to maintain forward-compatibility with the target version.

Introduced in: API Level 4

I'm curious because it appears that switching from:

<uses-sdk android:minSdkVersion="3" android:targetSdkVersion="4"/> to <uses-sdk android:minSdkVersion="3"/> is the change that started the

android.view.InflateException ... java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: bitmap size exceeds VM budget

errors I was randomly seeing in setContentView. When I remove the targetSdkVersion it runs much better.

Now I'm having trouble remembering what adding targetSdkVersion got me in the first place.