Material Design, AppCompat, and Backwards Compatibility

Question

I\'m trying to understand the principles of using Material Design a bit better (I\'m new to this area and have been reading documentations and tutorials, but the subject is

Answer 1

The whole point of AppCompat is that you only need one theme (you don't need a separate one in values-v21) and it will be the same experience on all devices.

Theme.AppCompat already extends android:Theme.Material on API 21+ - it is just handling all of the version checking for you.