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.)