Now that I'm working on a tablet-centric version of my app, I'm considering how it will impact my existing application in the Market. As far as I can see it, there are two ways this can go:
1) Leave your existing app as-is in the Market. Build a tablet version taking full advantage of Android 3.0, setting your minSdk to 11, using your existing code base (as applicable) as a library to share core code, and sell the apps independent of each other. Here you'll need to manage two code bases, even if "only" the UI side which we all know varies greatly from app to app. You're also requiring users to purchase twice effectively, assuming they want the app on both their phone and the tablet-centric version on their tablet. I guess the phone version would still work on the tablet, just not optimized for it. 2) Integrate fragments into your existing application and bundle in the tablet version along with the phone version. You'll need to drop support for Android 1.5 for the compatibility library, work around API differences between the phone and tablet APIs at run-time, and handle your UI activities and views differently between platforms. I'm not sure about that last part -- but it seems like with such a different UI concept behind 3.0 with the Action Bar and the general flow of an application can be so different, that you might need to break that apart. Could be very wrong there however and would love for someone to show me otherwise. There are a few things at play here. It's the battle on the technical side of dealing with different applications (package names, projects in Eclipse, apks, etc). It's also bringing into question how you want to manage your app; whether you want to charge for a tablet-optimized version or include it with the phone app someone has already purchased. Depending on what I learn related to packaging tablet specific features to an existing phone app, I'm quite undecided on which way I'll go. I suspect many of you have already been thinking about this very subject and I'm curious how you're planning to handle it. Please do include more options as you see them. How do the different API versions impact your thinking on the subject? -- Chris Stewart http://chriswstewart.com -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to android-developers@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to android-developers+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en
