Best practice for instantiating a new Android Fragment

The only benefit in using the newInstance() that I see are the following:

1. You will have a single place where all the arguments used by the fragment could be bundled up and you don't have to write the code below everytime you instantiate a fragment.

   Bundle args = new Bundle();
   args.putInt("someInt", someInt);
   args.putString("someString", someString);
   // Put any other arguments
   myFragment.setArguments(args);
   

2. Its a good way to tell other classes what arguments it expects to work faithfully(though you should be able to handle cases if no arguments are bundled in the fragment instance).

So, my take is that using a static newInstance() to instantiate a fragment is a good practice.

If Android decides to recreate your Fragment later, it's going to call the no-argument constructor of your fragment. So overloading the constructor is not a solution.

With that being said, the way to pass stuff to your Fragment so that they are available after a Fragment is recreated by Android is to pass a bundle to the setArguments method.

So, for example, if we wanted to pass an integer to the fragment we would use something like:

public static MyFragment newInstance(int someInt) {
    MyFragment myFragment = new MyFragment();

    Bundle args = new Bundle();
    args.putInt("someInt", someInt);
    myFragment.setArguments(args);

    return myFragment;
}

And later in the Fragment onCreate() you can access that integer by using:

getArguments().getInt("someInt", 0);

This Bundle will be available even if the Fragment is somehow recreated by Android.

Also note: setArguments can only be called before the Fragment is attached to the Activity.

This approach is also documented in the android developer reference: https://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/Fragment.html

There is also another way:

Fragment.instantiate(context, MyFragment.class.getName(), myBundle)