Indicates that the view has a hardware layer. A hardware layer is backed by a hardware specific texture (generally Frame Buffer Objects or FBO on OpenGL hardware) and causes the view to be rendered using Android's hardware rendering pipeline, but only if hardware acceleration is turned on for the view hierarchy. When hardware acceleration is turned off, hardware layers behave exactly as LayerType.Software.

A hardware layer is useful to apply a specific color filter and/or blending mode and/or translucency to a view and all its children.

A hardware layer can be used to cache a complex view tree into a texture and reduce the complexity of drawing operations. For instance, when animating a complex view tree with a translation, a hardware layer can be used to render the view tree only once.

A hardware layer can also be used to increase the rendering quality when rotation transformations are applied on a view. It can also be used to prevent potential clipping issues when applying 3D transforms on a view.

Indicates that the view has a software layer. A software layer is backed by a bitmap and causes the view to be rendered using Android's software rendering pipeline, even if hardware acceleration is enabled.

Software layers have various usages:

When the application is not using hardware acceleration, a software layer is useful to apply a specific color filter and/or blending mode and/or translucency to a view and all its children.

When the application is using hardware acceleration, a software layer is useful to render drawing primitives not supported by the hardware accelerated pipeline. It can also be used to cache a complex view tree into a texture and reduce the complexity of drawing operations. For instance, when animating a complex view tree with a translation, a software layer can be used to render the view tree only once.

Software layers should be avoided when the affected view tree updates often. Every update will require to re-render the software layer, which can potentially be slow (particularly when hardware acceleration is turned on since the layer will have to be uploaded into a hardware texture after every update.)