Q:

make app universally compatible for device with and without camera

I face a strange problem, 
My application works perfectly on devices with or without a camera; only a few functionalities are not available if you don't have a camera.
After uploading my app to the play store, the play store excluded some devices without a camera in which the app actually works fine!
By using this permission:  
              <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.CAMERA"/>

play store auto excludes. 
Has anybody faced similar problems?
Sorry if this is a duplicate (I hope it is not).

A:

From the docs:

In some cases, the permissions that you request through  can affect how your application is filtered by Google Play.
If you request a hardware-related permission — CAMERA, for example — Google Play assumes that your application requires the underlying hardware feature and filters the application from devices that do not offer it.
To control filtering, always explicitly declare hardware features in  elements, rather than relying on Google Play to "discover" the requirements in  elements. Then, if you want to disable filtering for a particular feature, you can add a android:required="false" attribute to the  declaration.

So, just add this to your manifest:
<uses-feature android:name="android.hardware.camera" android:required="false"/>

