Research And Implementation Of Android Application Integrating New Features Across Versions

With the rapid proliferation of mobile devices, more and more developers are turning to mobile development platform. Now there are so many platforms on mobile development market and each has its own site. Android platforms sprung up under such circumstance, ranking the champion in the market even beyond the IOS. While a growing number of Android applications have emerged.Android is proud of its "open mode", but with the benefit of saving development costs, it also has issues of too many versions and confused roles. Google’s version upgrade for Android is so fast that it has changed from version1.1to version4.4. With so many version changes in a short time and also every Android version has different functions, Android has run too fast that the equipment manufacturers may not keep up. Many high version features cannot be implemented on a low version of the device, and as users of Android applications, all of them use the same Android version system is not possible. For example. Android2.3still occupy a large market share even when now the main version is4.4. This leads to a result that the developers must develop different versions of applications to adapt to different devices. It runs counter to the model advocated by Google. One of the most obvious fact is the new features of Android3.0and above does not apply in versions below3.0. How to make an Android application complies with all Android versions in the market is a big challenge for the developers.Therefore, a good solution is to build a expansion pack to offer new features of a certain version to its previous version, which can make the mainstream version of Android applications achieve all the functions it needs and a good user experience.In this paper, we detailed described how to achieve an Android application that integrates new features of Android3.0to all versions. It also focused on the expansion pack ActionBarsherlock which involves in how the new features of Android3.0version will be ported to versions below. Particularly it studied the principles and implementation of ActionBar and Fragment in ActionBarSherlock.Against the existing technical characteristics and development framework of Android, this paper also designed and implemented a custom core library Android Common Library, whose main function is to optimize the commonly used functions, such as data analysis, image display and video playback. The components and interfaces provided by Google itself in practical applications may not be the best, and we do not want to repeat again and again the code which has been written in other places. So once we import this library, it would be more convenient to build Android applications.The application also implements the integration of Android Common Library with ActionBarsherlock expansion pack, mainly including Activity integration, Fragment integration and View integration, to optimize the entire development process.Finally, the application is subject to sporting events information, showing games, video playback, News, player information and so on. It also provides a consistent user experience across the various versions of the Android system.