Material Design backward compatibility

Question

From examples provided on the Android Developer pages I see that new Views, like the RecyclerView, are backward compatible (android.support.v7.widget.RecyclerView).

Are all the new things introduced in Material Design backward compatible (to which version)?

Answer 1

Updating this answer as Lollipop OS is officially released with support libraries, which you can use inside your project to provide compatibility to older versions.

Support library: v7 appcompat library

This library adds support for the Action Bar user interface design pattern. This library includes support for material design user interface implementations.

If you are using Android Studio then you just need to include below dependency identifier:

com.android.support:appcompat-v7:21.0.+ 

Answer 2

Material Design from Android 2.2 (API 8) to present 5.0 (API 21)

Here is what you need:

1. Toolbar
2. Material Design Library for widgets (buttons, checkboxes, etc)

1. Toolbar

Just get the idea and you ready to go.

<android.support.v7.widget.Toolbar     xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"     android:id="@+id/toolbar"     android:layout_width="match_parent"     android:layout_height="wrap_content"     android:background="?attr/colorPrimaryDark"/> 

Setup guide: http://antonioleiva.com/material-design-everywhere/

Source with example: https://github.com/antoniolg/MaterialEverywhere

To make Toolbar work lower API 11 use Theme.AppCompat.Light.NoActionBar (instead windowActionBar set to false)

<style name="NoActionBarTheme" parent="Theme.AppCompat.Light.NoActionBar">      ... </style> 

2. Material Design Library

Here is Material Design Library for pretty buttons, etc..

Guide, code, example - https://github.com/navasmdc/MaterialDesignLibrary

Guide how to add library to Android Studio 1.0 - How do I import material design library to Android Studio?

.

Happy coding ;)

Answer 3

Officialy the Material Design is backwards to the v7 appcompat Support Library.

Answer 4

Just to add on to Paresh's answer, not all the features of Material Design are available on older releases. Custom themes and activity transitions are only available for APIs > 21, however as others mentioned some of the features are available in support library.

https://developer.android.com/training/material/compatibility.html