Action Launcher 3

Action Launcher has long provided a different take on the standard homescreen / launcher app, offering unique and useful ideas like collapsible widgets and app icons that also act as folders. The latest version of the app incorporates those ideas with Material Design transitions and animations, making for an efficient, attractive, easy-to-use homescreen for your phone. Action Launcher 3 will even automatically customize the colors and backgrounds of folders, the app drawer, and persistent search box based on your current wallpaper, offering a personalized and cohesive look with minimal effort. Action Launcher 3 is available for free, with a $4.99 in-app purchase to unlock all of its features.

QKSMS
Long before Google decided to roll out its own Material Design messenger app, QKSMS offered an elegant solution. It's solidly focused on SMS and MMS.
QKSMS uses the floating plus button for launching a new message. You can quickly swipe from an individual message back to the main list with a swipe to the right. It has 19 different theme colors and a pop-out quick reply option to make messaging even faster.The free app offers an in-app upgrade bumping you up to 150 themes and a night mode for texting in the dark.

Falcon Pro 3

Twitter has updated its own app with some Material Design elements, but if you're looking for a complete experience, Falcon Pro 3 is what you want. It's a full-featured Twitter app built around Material Design guidelines, with great typography, beautiful transitions and animations, and a buttery-fluid user experience. It also has useful features like smart refresh rates based on your usage, granular notification controls, and big, bold inline images in your timeline. Falcon Pro 3 costs $3.99 for one Twitter account, with additional accounts running $1.99 each.

FeedlyReader

Our favorite RSS reader for Android, Press, hasn't been updated in a long time (the makers promise that a big Material Design update is in the works), but if you're a Feedly user looking for some Material Design right now, you want FeedlyReader. The simply-named FeedlyReader has everything most people look for in a feed reader: a spartan interface, pull-to-refresh, offline caching, and quick sharing to other services. It also has a customizable color palette based on the Material Design themes, as well as delightful animations throughout. 

Today Calendar


Today Calendar is absolutely gorgeous. It is full of delightful animations like the add event button morphing into an event composer and custom event backgrounds. An event that contains the keyword ‘coffee’ has an image of two coffee cups and reminder like events have a checkmark background. Today Calendar has multiple ways to view your schedule but the split view is easily the best one. It also has a lovely palette of colours that can be used to completely tweak the look and feel of the app. Today Calendar is available on Google Play for free as a 30 day trial. The pro version is available for $5.99.


Cabinet was one of the first apps to apply Google's new design directives, launching even before Android Lollipop became officially available. It's a basic file browser that makes it easy to jump between directories and access the files on your phone. Just this week I downloaded Lil Wayne's new mixtape directly to my phone and used Cabinet to unzip the file and place it in my Music folder.It's available for free from the Play Store.

Google Inbox

It might be cheating to include Google's own apps in this list, but Google's Inbox is one of the best examples of Material Design in action to date, so I'd be remiss to ignore it. Inbox has everything you want from a Material Design app: bold colors, fun pull-to-refresh actions, easy one-handed navigation, and informative animations. It actually makes it fun to manage your inbox, which is no small feat. Inbox is free and requires an invite to access, though those are fairly easy to come by. Google says that support for Google Apps accounts is in the works, but for now, it's Gmail accounts only.

Weather Timeline

Checking the weather is one of the most common things to do on your smartphone, and Weather Timeline is the prettiest way to do it on your Android device. Weather Timeline taps into the data from Forecast.io to provide hyperlocal forecasts, precipitation alerts, radar, and more. It has a brilliantly simple interface that lets you dive in to get more information, all the way down to hour-by-hour predictions. Weather Timeline also supports Android Wear and offers a useful Dashclock widget. It's available for $0.99.

Simplenote

Simplenote is my favorite cross-platform note taking app because it's just so fast and simple to use. A recent update to its Android app brings the Material Design you've been craving, along with a new dark theme. Evernote is better for more advanced note-taking, such as clipping websites and saving images, but for basic text notes, Simplenote is hard to beat. It's available for free from the Play Store now.

Google Messenger

Once again, one of Google's own apps offers some of the best Material Design you can get. The recently released Messenger app is a straight-forward SMS and MMS app that uses Google's new design directives to the fullest. It's fast, clean, and fun to use, even customizing each conversation with a different color. you would love to see Google add actionable notifications and iron out some of the MMS wrinkles a lot of users are seeing in it, but as far as design goes, Messenger can't be beat. You can download Messenger for free from the Google Play Store.

QuickPic

QuickPic has been my go-to gallery app on Android for a long time because it's fast and easy to use. A recent update made it even better, with Material Design animations and integrated cloud storage backup. If you're not a fan of Google's Photos app, which integrates Google+ with all of the images on your device, and just want something better to use, QuickPic is where it's at. QuickPic is free and available now.

Google Calendar

Like Inbox and Messenger, Google's own Calendar app is a brilliant example of Material Design in action. Bright colors, pleasing images, and fast and informative animations all combine to make a great calendar app experience. Google Calendar's full-month view is pretty basic, but agenda list and homescreen widget are wonderfully done. Nexus device users likely have Google Calendar already on their phones,you can download it for free from the Play Store.

Textra

Textra is an elegant SMS app. It ticks all the correct boxes with fluid animations and a look that would make any fan of good design proud. Textra is chock full of the functionality one would expect from an SMS app as well like delivery reports and custom notification settings. Textra even supports Android Wear and Pushbullet. The look can be customized with a wide array of colours that all look great. There’s also a great dark mode. Textra is available for free on Google Play.

Wally

Wallpaper apps on Google Play are as plentiful as weather apps on the App Store. Most of them look plain awful but there are a few that manage to get the job done well. Wally is the best wallpaper app on Android and its new Material Design look is excellent. Wally uses elements from wallpapers to decide the interface element colours and has a lot of subtle animations throughout. The loading animations while a wallpaper is downloading in particular is really good. Wally changes the top bar appearance as you swipe through the various sections of the app. Wally is available for free on Google Play.

Journal by Journey

Journal by Journey was one of the first apps to adopt Material Design. It makes use of great typography and an interface that doesn’t distract you at all. Every entry is organized in the navigation drawer. Sections like Atlas that shows you all your entries on the map and Inspirations that has inspirational quotes ready to be added make this app unique. The app uses a nice shade of blue throughout. There’s even a custom christmas background in the app today. Journal is available for free on Google Play. An in app purchase unlocks Markdown support, night mode, and data backup.

Flyne

Flyne, from the developer of the well known Twitter client Falcon Pro, is an offline reading app. It has been updated to sport a shiny new Material Design look after launch and it looks pretty great. Joaquim Vergès is known to update his apps often and quickly and as with Falcon Pro, Flyne is fantastic. It has a nice red theme throughout. The actual articles are at the forefront of the app with a lovely reading layout. Flyne pulls stories from predetermined sources or through Twitter and Feedly. The Twitter and Feedly options are available via separate in app purchases of $1.99 and $0.99 respectively. Flyne is available for free on Google Play.



TAGS : |