One of my favorite additions is TextViews being replaced with MaterialTextViews which add support for specifying line heights in TextAppearances. Handy.

As well as adding to existing widgets, MDC offers a number of new widgets, not available in the platform or AppCompat. You’ve likely seen Bottom Navigation, Bottom Sheet and Floating Action Buttons but might not have come across Chips, Date Picker or Time Picker.

For a complete list of components offered by the library, see the components section here.

Material Theming is a systematic way to customize Material Design to reflect your product’s brand. A Material Theme comprises color, typography and shape attributes. Customizing these will be automatically reflected in the components you use to build your app.

You can think of Material Theming as a design system for creating design systems 🤯. You configure the color, type and shape inputs and get out a complete design system for your brand.

Nick Rout goes in depth into each of the three sub-systems in the following posts:

MDC widgets implement Material’s dark theme guidance, with many widgets adapting their colors to dark themes and offering elevation overlays to communicate elevation when shadows don’t read.

Chris Banes goes in depth about MDC’s dark theme support in this article: