Google's Material Design is one of the few design languages that have managed to stand the test of time. It's been around for over five years now, and still continues to enjoy widespread popularity among Android users. The Android platform's SystemUI adheres to the guidelines of this design language, as do most popular apps available on Google Play today.
- App Templates20 Best Android App Templates of 2019
- Mobile Development10 Best Multi-Purpose Android App Templates
- App Templates15 Best eCommerce Android App Templates
- Android9 Android Templates to Inspire Your Next Project
Although Material Design's guidelines are well-documented and easy to understand, implementing them correctly using the Android SDK and AndroidX requires lots of careful coding and testing, primarily because you need to support multiple pixel densities, screen sizes, device orientations, and Android versions. By using MaterialX, however, you can save all that time and effort.
Developed by Envato Elite author Dream Space, MaterialX is a premium Material Design UI components library available on CodeCanyon. In addition to basic UI components such as buttons, cards, and sliders, it offers hundreds of unique, hand-crafted Material Design layouts you can directly start using in your apps. As such, while working with these layouts, you won't have to worry about tasks such as positioning UI components, adjusting their margins and paddings, or even animating them.
Let us now take a closer look at what MaterialX has to offer.
1. Navigation Components
It is very important that you have an attractive interface that allows users to move from one screen of your app to another. Material Design lists several components you can use to build such an interface, and MaterialX has implementations for all of them.
The most popular such component these days is the bottom navigation bar. MaterialX currently offers eight beautiful bottom navigation bars for you to choose from. Here are two such bars:
If you prefer using sliding drawers instead, this template gives you several options, all of which are geared towards different types of apps. For instance, if you're building a news app, you can use the Drawer News component. Similarly, if you're creating a mail-related app, you can use the Drawer Mail component.
Tabs, which usually complement top app bars, are also widely used in Android apps. MaterialX has a variety of tab views, which look good in both light and dark themes. As you might expect, all of them support the horizontal swipe gesture.
2. Lists and Grids
Lists are an integral part of Android apps, and a well-designed list can dramatically improve your app's user experience. MaterialX offers nearly a dozen different types of lists, including sectioned, animated, and multi-select lists. It also offers a few app-specific lists, such as lists for news apps.
If you need to show more than one item in a row, though, you'll have to use one of the six different grids this template has. In addition to the commonly used basic and sectioned grids, MaterialX has grids for gallery apps and caller apps.
Cards are often used with both lists and grids. Because MaterialX has card templates for handling most use cases, you can now avoid creating your own cards from scratch. Some of the card templates can be used to create introductory or tutorial screens too.
It's worth noting that MaterialX has separate components to display smaller lists, such as lists of tags and preferences lists.
3. Forms
Creating forms is hard. Convincing users to fill out and submit forms is harder still. Fortunately, MaterialX comes with a large number of beautiful templates for forms, which your users are going to enjoy filling in.
While creating forms, you are free to choose from either the generic form templates, such as those for sign-in and sign-up forms, or the domain-specific templates, such as those for eCommerce.
To make your life easier, MaterialX also has entire layouts dedicated to specific types of forms. Because these attractive layouts serve as full-fledged containers for the forms, you won't have to add any other UI components to your layout while using them. Currently, there are layouts for login forms, phone number verification forms, and payment forms.
Note that many of the form templates have dark-themed alternatives too.
4. Form Elements
If you're interested in creating forms yourself, instead of directly using Android's default form elements, you could try using the elements available in MaterialX. They are usually better-looking and provide a more interesting user experience.
The template has a variety of buttons, pickers, and sliders, as you can see in the screenshots below:
To facilitate displaying form-related messages, the template has several custom implementations for toasts, alert dialogs, and snackbars too.
5. Dashboards
An intuitive dashboard displaying lots of timely and context-sensitive data can be the ideal home screen for many kinds of apps, such as fitness apps, travel apps, and apps related to cryptocurrencies. MaterialX currently has 11 dashboards, each targeting a different domain. For example, here are two dashboard layouts, one for eCommerce apps and one for travel apps:
All the available dashboards are comprehensive, well thought out, and visually pleasing. Therefore, you can usually start using them without having to make any customizations.
6. Social Screens
Adding simple social features to your app is a great way to improve user retention. Typically, all you need to do is allow your users to create profiles for themselves and share content with friends or followers. MaterialX has dozens of components that can help you save time while implementing both these features.
This template has nearly two dozen layouts for profile pages, each with a unique look and feel. While some are generic, most are designed to target certain user groups, such as photographers, freelancers, and job seekers.
Additionally, MaterialX has layouts for displaying user feeds and timelines. If you're trying to implement Twitter-like functionality in your app, you're going to find these layouts extremely helpful.
Lastly, if you want to allow your users to communicate among themselves or with your team in real time, MaterialX offers layouts that are very similar to those you see in apps like WhatsApp and Telegram.
7. Screens for Blogs
Do you have a WordPress blog already? With MaterialX, you can create an Android app for it effortlessly.
The template has a large variety of layouts you can use for displaying your posts. These pleasant layouts can smoothly render both text and images.
Additionally, there are many layouts for "about us" pages, which you can use to talk about yourself or your company, and "search" pages, which you can use while adding search functionality to your app.
Because blogs these days aren't limited to just text and images, MaterialX has layouts for handling audio and video content too. The template has two layouts for video players and several for audio players, which support both independent sound files and playlists.
Conclusion
MaterialX is one of the most comprehensive Android app templates available on CodeCanyon. With over 2,250 sales and mostly five-star reviews, it's also one of the most popular templates there. In my opinion, it's a must-have for Android developers who want to dramatically improve the looks of their apps.
When you purchase a license for MaterialX, in addition to its source code, you'll get access to all its documentation. You can refer to it to learn more about the template.
If you found this article useful, do take a look at the following articles too:
- React NativeBeautiful Material Design Apps With the Antiqueruby React Native Components
- Material DesignBest Material Design Android App Templates
- App Templates20 Best Android App Templates of 2019
- Mobile Development17 Ways to Make Your Mobile App Beautiful With Envato Elements
- Android9 Android Templates to Inspire Your Next Project
- Android SDK10 Best Android Game Templates