Material Design was introduced by Google with Android 5.0 (lollipop).
The full range of design elements are available for any phone running Android 5.0 or above: ~30% of devices as of December, 2015 (source). While phones are upgrading, you can also support a select subset of elements on older devices via the App Compat library, specifically:
- Material design styles for some system widgets when you apply one of the
Theme.AppCompatthemes.- Color palette theme attributes in the
Theme.AppCompatthemes.- The RecyclerView widget to display data collections.
- The CardView widget to create cards.
- The Palette class to extract prominent colors from images.
For backwards compatibility, this very useful guide goes through both upgrading old apps and adding App Compat supported material elements to new ones. This page also has some useful tips like the reminder to set your android:targetSdkVersion to 21 in order to use the material design features on Android 5.0+ devices.
- Official Android Material UI guidelines - link
- Mobile UI patterns blog that has good Android examples - link
- AppCompat v21 — Material Design for Pre-Lollipop Devices! - link
- Implementing Material Design in your Android App (Android 5.0+) - link
- Material Design on Android Checklist - link
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