Should we design a theme for Android L Material?

Question

I just started developing my application for the Android L Material theme. I understand that we must first check whether our existing applications work with ART, the new WebView and all that, but even further I want my application to be ready for release when Android L is officially released. But I see that there is very little documentation, and I can not find the answers to some of the questions that I have -

• Will the material theme itself be available for older versions of Android?

• Is the Android L SDK publicly available right now to start building apps with it? I found several stack overflow messages where, as reported, the commons said they were being held until Android L.

• There are a few things that are mentioned in the design specifications, but there is no documentation there. For example, the Toolbar replaces the ActionBar according to the Google IO 2014 App . But why is this not mentioned anywhere on the Android L launch page? And will it be backward compatible with older versions through the support library?

• Any sample code on how to achieve an extended app bar as indicated on this page ?

Answer 1

Will the material theme itself be available for older versions of Android?

There have been some comments from Google that say they will do something in this area. Not everything can be offered in the form of backport. Therefore, we will not know until they set off.

Is the Android SD SDK publicly available right now to start building apps with it? I found a few stack overflow messages where, reportedly, the commons said they held until Android L.

The reason for my advice is that we do not know how stable the L API is, especially with respect to Material Design. If you want to experiment with L for this kind of thing, great! But I would leave such things in the development branch until the next version of Android.

But why is it not mentioned anywhere on the Android L getting started page?

There are many things in documents that are not mentioned in the documents, especially in the API level release notes. This is normal for Android, which is why I and others write blog posts like this one and this one .

And will it be backward compatible with older versions through the support library?

This has not been announced. We will find out when the next production version of Android is shipped.

Any sample code on how to achieve an extended application bar as indicated on this page?

I do not know a single one, although I also did not pay attention to it. My personal aesthetics says "yuck" for this aspect of Material Design .:-)