Why does a protected android:onClick method in Activity actually work?

Suppose you define android:onClick="doClick" in your Activity as

protected void doClick(View view) { }

The documentation states that

This name must correspond to a public method that takes exactly one parameter of type View.

This is a given requirement of the underlying Class.getMethod() method, which only finds public methods as the documentation states that it

Returns a Method object that reflects the specified public member method of the class or interface represented by this Class object.

So how is it possible, that this implementation, which should not work at all, works on some devices and emulators, while it doesn't work on others using the same API levels as well?

from Why does a protected android:onClick method in Activity actually work?