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Comment by Zigurd | Hacker News Reader

The irony of this is that, with Android 4.x and the Fragment APIs for scaling UI from tablets to handsets, Android is the only UI system that has sophisticated ways for apps to intelligently arrange their UI elements to fit all sizes of devices, and developers are, as yet, ignoring those APIs.

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"Intelligently" yes, but not intuitively. There's a difference.

That being said all of Google's products cater to, and now operate consistently for, a certain mindset. Reluctantly I'll admit that it's possible for a platform to successfully operate using parameters other than intuition-based UX/UI. It just feeeels weird ;-)

Whether it's intuitive depends on the developer :)

Android Fragments really aren't useful when A) you can't use them yet because so many users are on older unsupported versions (insert generic "fragmentation" pun here) and B) you still can't smoothly scroll a ListView containing more than a dozen Views or a few text shadows.

The Android SDK includes a library called the Support Package (previously called the Android Compatibility Package). This library provides support for Fragment and related classes, and Loader and related classes back to Android 1.6.

Even if you are targeting API levels lower than in 3.x, using the Support Package is a substantial benefit in organizing your UI code and improved concurrency support.

As ever, you can set your minimum API level below the API level to which you build, and test for API availability at runtime, for any API in Android.

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