If you open the AndroidManifest.xml with the manifest editor, it will immediately be marked as modified. If you save it, it will randomize the order of the attributes within each tag.

This is most likely due to randomization of hashes in Qt, which are used to store the attributes in the XML DOM classes. In that case, setting the environment variable QT_HASH_SEED in the environment where you are running Qt Creator should make it deterministic, so that the reordering happens maximum once.

An ideal solution for this would be to make a framework that supported minimizing the diff when modifying XML, but this is currently not available in Qt.

Other possible solutions which at least improves on the problem would be to make the DOM classes deterministic (not use QHash) or use a different API for reading the XML files.