Starting from Android 3 (API level 11), there is a hardware renderer for 2D graphics, which drastically increases performance. The hardware acceleration was disabled by default and had to be enabled by the developer by declaring in his AndroidManifest.xml file:

<application android:hardwareAccelerated="true" ...>

According to the android documentation, that value changed to true starting with API level 14:

The default value is "true" if you’ve set either minSdkVersion or targetSdkVersion to "14" or higher; otherwise, it’s "false".

This is true for some devices (like the HTC Sensation with Android 4.0.3), but does NOT apply for the Samsung Galaxy S2 with official Android 4.0.3 and 4.0.4.

Applications without above attribute explicitly set to true are not hardware accelerated automatically on that device. On the HTC Sensation they are.

So don’t forget to declare that attribute in your AndroidManifest.xml file, if you want hardware acceleration on all devices.

Users can force-enable the use of GPU rendering in the developer options, which can be used as a workaround with the risk of incompatible applications yielding render errors.

WordMix 2D view must not use hardware acceleration

Currently, the 2D view of my WordMix game uses some features of Canvas, that are incompatible with hardware acceleration and results in display bugs. These glitches did not occur on my Samsung Galaxy S2, because it was not hardware accelerated as stated above, but occured on another device, a HTC Sensation with Android 4. Took me a while to figure out, what exactly was going on, but after declaring

<application android:hardwareAccelerated="false" ...>

fixed it for the time being, until I changed the render code to be hardware accelerated.