Fragments

A Fragment represents a reusable portion of your app's UI. A fragment defines and manages its own layout, has its own lifecycle, and can handle its own input events. Fragments cannot live on their own--they must be hosted by an activity or another fragment. The fragment’s view hierarchy becomes part of, or attaches to, the host’s view hierarchy.

Modularity

Fragments introduce modularity and reusability into your activity’s UI by allowing you to divide the UI into discrete chunks. Activities are an ideal place to put global elements around your app's user interface, such as a navigation drawer. Conversely, fragments are better suited to define and manage the UI of a single screen or portion of a screen.

Consider an app that responds to various screen sizes. On larger screens, the app should display a static navigation drawer and a list in a grid layout. On smaller screens, the app should display a bottom navigation bar and a list in a linear layout. Managing all of these variations in the activity can be unwieldy. Separating the navigation elements from the content can make this process more manageable. The activity is then responsible for displaying the correct navigation UI while the fragment displays the list with the proper layout.