Google’s Material Design, a big part of the legacy of Matias Duarte, is something that app developers throughout Google’s ecosystem have been encouraged to use, whether they’re developing something for the web, PC, Android, or Chrome. Clear guidelines have been established for how to achieve Material Design, but even with that, some apps may not be spot on, or some creators may have a hard time nailing Material Design in their app. In these situations, it may be handy to have a set of predefined Material Design behaviors and assets that can be applied universally to all apps across an ecosystem, perhaps publicly available and even open-source. Luckily, that’s exactly what Google has provided to developers worldwide.
GitHub, an open-source haven that usually hosts community projects, now plays host to Google’s in-house Material Components, open for anybody to pick up and use, or even put their own spin on. The Material Components set that Google has uploaded to GitHub is available in formats that are compatible with Android, iOS, and web apps. Each different version of Material Components, made for different ecosystems and environments, is made to integrate and be used differently. The Android implementation of Material Components is tightly interwoven with a design support utility and resource library built into the Android SDK, which gets updated as often as that tool does. This particular implementation can essentially be used with nearly any Android app.
The new Material Components are also available on iOS, as a piece of Apple’s normal development kit. This makes the components easy to implement in iOS apps, akin to implementing just about any other component in the standard development toolset. The web version, on the other hand, is available piecemeal, letting developers pick and choose what parts they actually want to integrate into their projects. For the sake of convenience, this version integrates quite easily with just about any JS-based project, which means that most simple web projects can now follow Material Design guidelines with minimal effort. The Material Components set is up on GitHub right now for public download and usage by anybody who would like to use it.