Publications de Pierre Degand

Material Components is the (not so) new library made by the Material team to replace the old support design library. It provides components to apply Material Design in your application with ease. Among these components, you can find the famous FloatingActionButton, the CardView or the BottomSheet. But there are also some less known, nonetheless powerful, components. And one of them is the MaterialShapeDrawable.

In modern Android development, there is a huge rise of advanced architectures like MVP, MVVM or Clean Architecture, crazy libraries like RxJava or Dagger and even new languages like Kotlin. But on most projects, theme and styles are still written in an oldschool way with no consideration on how to architecture them. But these XML are part of your code base and you should show them the same love you show to your Java Code.

For beginner Android developer or the more experienced ones who don't do much of the UI work, understanding the difference between styles and themes and how they should be used can be very difficult to understand. With AppCompat being a must have in every app and as it's relying A LOT on themes and style, understanding all this can be very frustrating when it comes to customizing its default behaviors. With this article, I'll try to explain what this is all about and how it…