navigation - In Android application, when to use View control instead of Tab

I develop a shopping application for one company. First time I design to use Tab to categorize product in shop. But I am not sure Ishould use "View control" instead of "Tab" or not.

Tab and View Control have the same functionality to allow users to explore and switch between View. It should have a better reason than "It's looking good when use View Control"

If It has some principle on Android. It will be easy to design application next time. :-)

Answer

Strictly speaking, both tabs and spinners are view controls in the Android Design Guidelines. To quote from them:

However, dealing with when you should use tabs vs spinners, it is primarily a question of space and design.

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  Spinners take up less space and allow the user to (usually) see all of the options at once.

  
  
  


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  Fixed tabs display all items concurrently, but take up more space and are only workable with a few categories with short titles.

  
  


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  Scrolling tab controls take up less space and can contain a larger number of items than a standard tab control, but don't let a user see all of the items at the same time, and so requires more exploration. Technically you can have many sections, but practically it is not a good idea to have more than about 4 of them.