I admit that I haven't paid much attention. But the whole revamp of the UI framework into Fragments was precisely to let app developers support both phones and tablets.
Why do you say older versions of Android had better support for tablets?
Why do you say older versions of Android had better support for tablets?
Android, I think, is not even supposed to be a well-engineered system. It is not central to its purpose. Its purpose is to eat marketshare, collect data, and ensure there is an outlet for ads. It only has to work well enough to do those things :)
I get the sense that it was all slapped together as quickly as possible.
Sadly it is hard to win over free beer.
It was, historically. Android was a startup that had to get to market as fast as they could. To make matters worse, once the iPhone came out they had to quickly switch from a Treo-like interface to a iOS-like one in order to stay relevant.
To Google's credit, they've been trying for years to clean it up, but there's only so much they can do…
Our app has a great tablet version, on par with iPad and we don’t use fragments at all. We just change things based on size.
It’s more that Google obviously stopped caring about tablets many major versions ago.
Once the civil war between him and Pichai had a clear winner (after all, for a while both ChromeOS and Android were poised to push into the same market), the tablet elements were depreciated rapidly as as Duarte was free to assert more control.