Fragment or Support Fragment?

android android-fragments android-support-library
brillenheini picture brillenheini · Jun 25, 2013 · Viewed 36.2k times · Source

I am developing an app that supports Android >= 4.0. It uses fragments from the android.app package. As I am facing problems with the older fragment implementation in 4.0, like this one, that are already fixed in the support library, I am considering switching back to the fragment implementation from the support library to get a more reliable and consistent implementation.

What is your opinion on this? Are you using fragments from the support library, even though they are already available, when developing for Android 4?

Answer

brillenheini picture brillenheini · Jun 29, 2013

From my experience, using the same fragment implementation on all Android devices is a great advantage. I could not get rid of all NullPointerExceptions when state is saved on Android 4.0 using native fragments, with the support library they are all gone. Also I could not see any disadvantage so far with this approach.

So my answer to my own question is now: When developing for Android 4.x, using the fragments from the support library is a good idea. The support library has bugs fixed that are still present in older fragment implementations and is frequently updated with more bug fixes.

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