Difference between Activity and FragmentActivity

FragmentActivity is part of the support library, while Activity is the framework's default class. They are functionally equivalent.

You should always use FragmentActivity and android.support.v4.app.Fragment instead of the platform default Activity and android.app.Fragment classes. Using the platform defaults mean that you are relying on whatever implementation of fragments is used in the device you are running on. These are often multiple years old, and contain bugs that have since been fixed in the support library.

A FragmentActivity is a subclass of Activity that was built for the Android Support Package.

The FragmentActivity class adds a couple new methods to ensure compatibility with older versions of Android, but other than that, there really isn't much of a difference between the two. Just make sure you change all calls to getLoaderManager() and getFragmentManager() to getSupportLoaderManager() and getSupportFragmentManager() respectively.