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Many applications involve several screens of data that a user might want to browse or flip through to view each screen. As an example, think of an application where we list a catalogue of books with each book in the catalogue appearing on a single screen. A book’s screen contains an image, title, and description like the following screenshot:
To view each book’s information, the user needs to move to each screen. We could put a next button and a previous button on the screen, but a more natural action is for the user to use their thumb or finger to swipe the screen from one edge of the display to the other and have the screen with the next book’s information slide into place as represented in the following screenshot:
This creates a very natural navigation experience, and honestly, is a more fun way to navigate through an application than using buttons.
Summary
Fragments are the foundation of modern Android app development, allowing us to display multiple application screens within a single activity. Thanks to the flexibility provided by fragments, we can now incorporate rich navigation into our apps with relative ease. Using these rich navigation capabilities, we’re able to create a more dynamic user interface experience that make our apps more compelling and that users find more fun to work with.
Resources for Article :
Further resources on this subject:
- So, what is Spring for Android? [Article]
- Android Native Application API [Article]
- Animating Properties and Tweening Pages in Android 3-0 [Article]
