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It was mentioned that app shortcuts will have total 5. But on my emulator, they are maxing out to 4. I tried both static as well as dynamic shortcuts. Is it a known bug?

Rishikesh Shukla
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The framework caps the number of app shortcuts to five. However, apps rendering those shortcuts can do whatever they want, including showing only a subset of those app shortcuts.

Google hints at this in the "Best Practices" section:

Although the API currently supports a combination of up to five static shortcuts and dynamic shortcuts for your app at any given time, it's recommended that you publish only four distinct shortcuts at any time to improve the shortcuts' visual appearance in the launcher.

My interpretation of this has been "the Pixel Launcher is only showing four". Other home screens, or other app shortcuts clients, can show one, two, three, four, or five of your app shortcuts.

CommonsWare
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  • "The Google Now Launcher (and Pixel Launcher) will only support app shortcuts on Android 7.1 and above." How about this? Since no, other launcher is ever gonna support it, what's the point of having a max limit(5) and then enforcing the recommended(4) – Rishikesh Shukla Nov 21 '16 at 13:09
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    @RishikeshShukla: "Since no, other launcher is ever gonna support it" -- since other launchers are already supporting app shortcuts, your statement seems to be in error. The passage that you are quoting is referring to those specific launchers and on what versions of Android they will support app shortcuts. Particularly for static app shortcuts, those would work all the way back to API Level 1, for any home screen that wants to parse the metadata manually. Some already are. – CommonsWare Nov 21 '16 at 13:34