What I thought of “Instant Android Fragmentation Management How-to”

I was recently contacted by the marketing team from Packt Publishing and asked if I could write a review for one of their new ebooks, so here it is!

This book gives a brief yet comprehensive overview of some of the processes you can follow to improve your applications chance of working on the varying versions of android that are currently in existence.

Having developed apps that work perfectly fine on my Galaxy S2 2.3.3, only to find they don’t work on a hardware identical S2 with 4.0, I certainly feel the pain of OS fragmentation!

The book discusses some of the approaches you can take using the android compatibility library, fragments, loaders and action bars that enable you to write against the latest APIs but still have a good chance of having your app work on previous versions.

Things I liked about this book

• A short and focused read, I got through it in around an hour.
• Lots of code examples and references to external reading material.
• The reference to ActionBarSherlock I felt was very much needed, as always if there are open source alternatives that work better, we should adopt them rather than struggle!

Things I didn’t like

• I did feel that having some more screenshots would have helped emphasised the topic in discussion, whilst there were some screenshots throughout I did constantly find myself thinking “what should this actually look like?”
• The chapters could have done with a more expanded overview, particularly the loaders section as it jumped right into creating one before explaining what it is, and how it differs from other non-UI asynchronous mechanisms like async tasks.

All in all I rate this as 4/5. The ebook is very reasonably priced and for the price of a few beers it’d certainly worth it, even for the discussions on ActionBarSherlock and Fragments. If your struggling to support multiple android versions, this book is a good starting point for you.