Why does the Google Play store say my Android app is incompatible with my own device?

The answer appears to be solely related to application size. I created a simple "hello world" app with nothing special in the manifest file, uploaded it to the Play store, and it was reported as compatible with my device.

I changed nothing in this app except for adding more content into the res/drawable directory. When the .apk size reached about 32 MB, the Play store started reporting that my app was incompatible with my phone.

I will attempt to contact Google developer support and ask for clarification on the reason for this limit.

UPDATE: Here is Google developer support response to this:

Thank you for your note. Currently the maximum file size limit for an app upload to Google Play is approximately 50 MB.

However, some devices may have smaller than 50 MB cache partition making the app unavailable for users to download. For example, some of HTC Wildfire devices are known for having 35-40 MB cache partitions. If Google Play is able to identify such device that doesn't have cache large enough to store the app, it may filter it from appearing for the user.

I ended up solving my problem by converting all the PNG files to JPG, with a small loss of quality. The .apk file is now 28 MB, which is below whatever threshold Google Play is enforcing for my phone.

I also removed all the <uses-feature> stuff, and now have just this:

<uses-sdk android:minSdkVersion="4" android:targetSdkVersion="15" />

I ran into this as well - I did all of my development on a Lenovo IdeaTab A2107A-F and could run development builds on it, and even release signed APKs (installed with adb install) with no issues. Once it was published in Alpha test mode and available on Google Play I received the "incompatible with your device" error message.

It turns out I had placed in my AndroidManifest.xml the following from a tutorial:

<uses-feature android:name="android.hardware.camera" />
<uses-feature android:name="android.hardware.camera.autofocus" />
<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.CAMERA" />

Well, the Lenovo IdeaTab A2107A-F doesn't have an autofocusing camera on it (which I learned from http://www.phonearena.com/phones/Lenovo-IdeaTab-A2107_id7611, under Cons: lacks autofocus camera). Regardless of whether I was using that feature, Google Play said no. Once that was removed I rebuilt my APK, uploaded it to Google Play, and sure enough my IdeaTab was now in the compatible devices list.

So, double-check every <uses-feature> and if you've been doing some copy-paste from the web check again. Odds are you requested some feature you aren't even using.

I have experienced this problem too while developing an application for a customer that wanted to have videos offline available from their application. I have written a blogpost about why the app I worked on for months wouldn't show up in the play store for my device (post can be found here). I found the same as @Greg Hewgill found: Cache partition limitations on some devices.

The journey didn't stop for me there. The customer wanted to have these videos in the application and didn't want the quality of the video to be decreased. After some research I figured out that using expansion files was the perfect solution to our problem.

To share my knowledge with the Android community I held a talk at droidconNL 2012 about expansion files. I created a presentation and sample code to illustrate how easy it can be to start using expansion files. For any of you out there wanting to use expansion files to solve this problem feel free to check out the post containing the presentation and the sample code