Sorry I can not describe why this works, I guess that the UE has some SDK limit buildin (if you check the settings for your project you can find that the target SDK ends on 31 for UE5.1) while the UE builds a game it send the info to gradle and tell “no matter what user sets, my max is 31”, that is why we need a manifest, the manifest file is the most important file for the gradle and it should follow what the manifest say.