What is Fragmentor

Fragmentation is a side effect of the high diversity of mobile devices. Some of such diversity is accidental (e.g., diversity caused by platform implementation bugs) and often can be eliminated with the use of better standardization. However, most of such diversity is essential (e.g., diversity of screen size) and the resultant fragmentation needs to be dealt with. Currently, there are many tools and techniques for de-fragmenting mobile applications (i.e., to reverse the effects of fragmentation and make the application work as expected on all target devices). The chapter gives an in-depth analysis of the fragmentation problem and the current state-of-the-practice in dealing with the problem. In particular, it illustrates how the current tools and techniques fit into nine basic approaches: MANUAL-MULTI, SELECTIVE, EMBED, INJECT, GENERATE, AIM-LOW, ABSTRACTION-LAYER, SELF-ADAPT, and DEVICE-ADAPT. The authors use a running example of a simple mobile application and a free de-fragmenting tool to demonstrate each approach. The reader of this chapter will gain an insight into the theoretical and practical issues related to fragmentation of mobile applications, the current state-of-the-practice in de-fragmenting, how the various de-fragmenting approaches relate to each other, and how they fit into a bigger picture.