[krschultz]

Nothing is mandatory. Material guidelines are a suggestion and a set of tools to make the baseline app better by default.

In general the UI components are moving out of the SDK into the support libs or the community at large. RecyclerView & Toolbar are examples of Google untangling the foundation from the look & feel, and letting the community come up with the final implementation of things.

[dharma1]

Is that a deliberate strategy or a lack of communication between teams at Google to create the SDK level support for components their design team designs?

[izacus]

I don't understand this sentiment, why do you need those components? There's bunch of 3rd party libraries to implement the UI patterns. Do you go annoy Safari/Chrome/Firefox developers that they don't provide you with components for carousels in browsers as well?

[dharma1]

Annoy? I'm not sure I understand that sentiment.

I think the comparison between operating systems and browsers is apples (no pun) and oranges. Browsers generally don't implement any specific UI design language, whereas operating systems do.

Android is a system where Google controls most of the baseline UI and does implement much of the Material design language in the SDK- but at least on the launch of 5.0 several components were missing. As you rightly say the community came to the rescue and there are several versions of each component now on github.

Was just wondering if that was on purpose, and the strategy is only to provide base components in the SDK, and only visual designs of a more comprehensive set of UI components - and then let the community implement the missing components outlined in the design guidelines? Not saying that's a bad thing, just curious if it's done on purpose.