Using Android L Material Design on KitKat

Question

Reading the Compatibility section of Android L Developer Preview (http://developer.android.com/preview/material/compatibility.html) I\'ve seen that i can create an APP using

Answer 1

You have to create 2 different styles.xml files with the same name that you will put in different folders.

The first, will go here:

res/styles.xml

and will look NOT have a reference to the Material theme (use the Holo theme):

so would have something like this:

<style name="AppTheme" parent="android:Theme.Holo.Light"></style>

The second will go here:

res/values-v21/styles.xml

and WILL contain the reference to the new Material theme, and would have:

<style name="AppTheme" parent="android:Theme.Material.Light"></style>

The Android framework will automatically use the correct one depending on which API the device supports (so on API 21 devices it will use Material, and on all other devices, it will use whatever else you define).

Answer 2

This has changed since the original answer, as Google released better support for Material design in the AppCompat libraries (which support mostly all versions of Android).

At this point, you should be using these libraries for all development, then you will be able to support Material design related features in all your apps.

Here is how to set it up: https://developer.android.com/topic/libraries/support-library/setup.html