As the Android platform has progressed through its various iterations, Google has heard concerns of third-party developers that applications encounter compatibility issues with mobile devices currently on the market.
To address that fragmentation issue, Google has extended its Honeycomb API, a part of Android 3.0, to provide backwards compatibility with existing tablets and smartphones.
Using the Fragments API, developers can now avoid the nuisance of having to build two separate applications for Honeycomb devices and earlier Android devices.
“Today we’ve released a static library that exposes the same Fragments API (as well as the new LoaderManager and a few other classes) so that applications compatible with Android 1.6 or later can use fragments to create tablet-compatible user interfaces,” Xavier Ducrohet, Google’s Android SDK tech lead, wrote in a blog post.
Developer.com takes a look.