Material Design, Appcompat, And Backwards Compatibility

I'm trying to understand the principles of using Material Design a bit better (I'm new to this area and have been reading documentations and tutorials, but the subject is still a b

Solution 1:

The whole point of AppCompat is that you only need one theme (you don't need a separate one in values-v21) and it will be the same experience on all devices.

Theme.AppCompat already extends android:Theme.Material on API 21+ - it is just handling all of the version checking for you.