Question

For tablet sized screens you tend to end up with one or some small number of activities, and more fragments and you swap out part of the UI with different fragments. This all makes sense and is pretty easy to build and manage.

But what about for a phone sized screen? traditionally you’d use a different activity for each screen, but does that still make sense, seems annoying and tedious to have if tablet() swapFragments else startActivity() logic everywhere.

It seems like a better idea might be to follow the tablet structure more closely and have fewer activities, and have some interactions swap out the one fragment that you can see, but the google blog entry on fragments uses activities still for the smaller display, so not sure that’s the right way to go.

So for people build apps that support phone & tablet sized screens, what are you doing, few activities & mostly fragments everywhere, or still mostly activities for the phone sized screens?, or something else ?

Answer 1

I prefer Activities and Fragments. One Activity will have one or two fragments depending upon the screen size.

Lets take fragment one is list and fragment two is detail of the item selected in the list.

So I define two layouts one for phone (consists of one fragment) and other for tablet (tablet one contains layout consist of two fragments).

One this is done, Activity will have small logic to determine is two fragments are loaded or one. If one then it has to launch another activity for second fragment. If two fragments are there then just load the other fragment with the corresponding data.