IssueTracker

Yesterday while testing an update, I found that our app closes (no force close message is shown) when running on older Android devices as soon as it tries to inflate a menu XML file with a support.v7.widget.SearchView in it.

We have a version of our app in the Play Store that uses the same search code (though it uses an older version of appcompat-v7, and built with older build tools). That version works fine on devices that are affected by this issue. The search code and configuration have not changed since that version was released, though we've moved over to Android Studio + Gradle from IntelliJ 12. I've successfully run the app on older devices since that change.

I've attached a simple sample project that reproduces the error, and the logcat output when it's run on the 2.3.3 emulator. The key line in the log seems to be:
Could not find class 'android.support.v7.widget.SearchView$5', referenced from method android.support.v7.widget.SearchView.addOnLayoutChangeListenerToDropDownAnchorSDK11

The sample project runs fine on my Nexus 5 (Android 4.4.2, an Acer A500 tablet (Android 4.0.3) and the Android 3.0 emulator.
It crashes on Android 2.3.3 and Android 2.2 emulators and on 2 different devices (HTC Desire HD A9191 on Android 2.3.5, Samsung Galaxy S GT-I9000 on Android 2.3.3).

It seems strange that an SDK11 method is being called when the device SDK is 10, and that strangeness seems consistent with the app working on API11+ devices but not below.

As far as I can tell the only thing that has changed since I last successfully built and ran the app on a 2.3 device a few days ago is that I ran an SDK update yesterday. My versions are as follows:
Android Studio 0.5.1 (on OS X 10.9.2, running on compiling with Oracle Java 1.7.0_51)
SDK Tools 22.6.1
Platform-tools 19.0.1
Build-tools 19.0.3
SDK Platform 19 rev 3
Support Repository rev 4

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Menu XML:
<menu xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
    xmlns:app="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res-auto">
    <item
        android:id="@+id/action_search"
        android:title="@string/action_search"
        android:icon="@drawable/abc_ic_search"
        app:actionViewClass="android.support.v7.widget.SearchView"
        app:showAsAction="ifRoom" />
</menu>

MainActivity:
import android.os.Build;
import android.support.v4.view.MenuItemCompat;
import android.support.v7.app.ActionBarActivity;
import android.os.Bundle;
import android.support.v7.widget.SearchView;
import android.view.Menu;
import android.view.MenuItem;
import android.widget.TextView;
...
public boolean onCreateOptionsMenu(Menu menu) {
    // Removing this prevents the crash:
    getMenuInflater().inflate(R.menu.main, menu);

    MenuItem searchItem = menu.findItem(R.id.action_search);
    searchView = (SearchView) MenuItemCompat.getActionView(searchItem);

    return true;
}

build.gradle:
apply plugin: 'android'

android {
    compileSdkVersion 19
    buildToolsVersion "19.0.3"

    defaultConfig {
        minSdkVersion 9
        targetSdkVersion 19
        versionCode 1
        versionName "1.0"
    }

    compileOptions {
        sourceCompatibility JavaVersion.VERSION_1_7
        targetCompatibility JavaVersion.VERSION_1_7
    }
    buildTypes {
        release {
            runProguard false
            proguardFiles getDefaultProguardFile('proguard-android.txt'), 'proguard-rules.txt'
        }
    }
}

dependencies {
    compile 'com.android.support:support-v4:19.0.1'
    compile 'com.android.support:appcompat-v7:19.0.1'

    compile fileTree(dir: 'libs', include: ['*.jar'])
}