Best Material Design Apps Android 2015

Material Design is the new set of guidelines that Google has set forth for developers when designing their apps. It brings in bold pops of vibrant color and plenty of animations, and while Google themselves have redone most of their apps in Material Design, there are loads of other apps out there that are utilizing this new look for their UI's. Using material design is a step you'll want to consider if you plan on monetizing your Android app, as the new set of design guidelines is something that users tend to look for within applications these days. We put together a list of the top 30 applications with striking Material Design visuals that are definitely worth checking out as a reference to help you design your new app.

Journey (Journal, Diary)

Journey is the perfect app for chronicling your memories, thoughts and special moments and turning them into a travel log that tells a story of where you've been. Of course, it also uses the gorgeous Material Design style interface which really makes it inviting and easy to use. Better yet, it syncs with Chrome so you can use the Android app or on the computer interface within the Chrome browser as a web app, meaning you can keep up with your journal entries no matter what device you have at your disposal.

Groupme

Groupme is a group chat application making it simple for multiple people to keep in contact all at the same time. It's more than chat though as the app now allows you to make events, and you even use the app to split the bill at group outings with money transfers happening right in the app. You can also share videos, GIF images and more within chat making it more versatile than other chat apps.

Inbox

You may or may not be familiar with Inbox by Gmail, but it's an app you may want to keep on your radar since it could totally revolutionize the way you interact with emails throughout the day. Inbox goes to work for you and helps you get things done. It's more than just email, as you can use it to set reminders that show up right in the inbox. It also bundles "like" emails together so you can narrow down where everything is and get to more important emails more quickly.

Open Imgur

This is simply an open source imgur client app. It's built using the material design style interface and comes ad-free, with a built-in meme generator and native GIF/GIFV support.

Material Newspaper

This is essentially a news aggregator. It compiles news and articles from your favorite sources, but more than news you can also add YouTube videos and images from sites like Flickr into the feed so you don't miss anything. It can even integrate with Twitter and Instagram accounts so those timelines show up in the feed as well.

Material Manager

File manager apps are a great thing to have installed, and although many devices have a pre-installed version some of them either lack in features or design. Material Manager has a great material design look to it and features things like extraction of rar, ZIP and 7z files, and you can preview apk files that you have stored on the phone. It also makes moving files around easy as you can either cut or copy them, and then paste them in the desired location.

My Cloud Player

This is a material design styled Sound Cloud client. Among the features it includes, Chromecast support is one of the most useful, but it also features support for XBMC and UPnp/DLNA and all three support continuous playback. You can use it to listen to your favorite stations and manage your current playlist, and there's a host of advanced features too, like charts which list the most played tracks in a week and integration with the Simple Last.FM scrobbler.

Droidddle

This is the official application for Dribbble, a material design app-based interface for the community of web designers, graphic designers, illustrators, icon artists and many other types of designers to share their work and show people what they're currently working on. Creators can use the app to share their works in progress while everyone else can use it as a discovery tool to follow their favorite designers and check out cool design projects.

Lumific – Photo Gallery

Lumific is a beautiful photo gallery application for anyone that isn't happy with the stock photo gallery app that comes preinstalled on their device. While there are many great features within Lumific, one notable feature is the ability to order photo prints from Lumific through Snapfish by HP. Now you can have any photo taken with your camera printed out to keep and to share. Lumific also takes similar photos and recreates them into GIF images automatically, and it now integrates with Dropbox to sync photos for backup.

Falcon Pro 3

Falcon Pro has been one of the best Twitter clients on Android since its initial launch, and with Falcon Pro 3 things have only gotten better with the new material design style interface. Besides giving users a fast interaction, Falcon Pro 3 also lists things in columns so they're easier to read and interactions that are relevant to you are shown in the side panel with what the developer calls a smart automatic refresh system.

Cabinet Beta

Cabinet Beta is a newer file manager application with a simplistic approach to design but still laden with material design flare. You'll find quick access to folder shortcuts in the menu panel that slides out from the left, as well as root access for users who love to tinker with things on their device. It also supports ZIP file extraction and remote server access via SFTP, as well as other basic features like cut, copy and paste for easy maneuvering of the files.

Field Trip

Field Trip is a unique discovery application built by the Niantic Labs team at Google, the same team that runs the popular augmented reality game Ingress. Harnessing the power of AR technology, Field Trip lets you explore and discover hidden information about cool places around you. The application runs in the background and will end up listing pop-up cards on the screen once you get close to something worth discovering. It has integrated social features allowing you to share your discoveries with others and you can mark stuff as favorites so you can return to them at a later point.

Player FM Podcast

Podcasts are a great way to consume the content you love if you don't have the ability to read it, and Player FM Podcast adds in loads of useful features for anyone looking to start listening to podcasts. To start, it's cloud-based, which means you can listen to it across devices. It's also equipped for offline playback so you can still listen to stuff even without a data connection. You'll also never have to worry about not being able to listen to an entire podcast all the way through, since play history will let you resume from where you left off.

Flipagram

Flipagram lets you create short stories from your pictures and draws from various sources like Instagram, Facebook or the images taken with your phone's camera, and then lets you add music in the background to create a cool little montage. Flipagram makes things social with people to follow and stuff to share with friends, but you can also choose to keep each individual Flipagram private.

Google Calendar

Google Calendar is a great display of what material design within apps can be like. The floating action button is there and has become one of the mainstays of what to look for within something that has been built using material design, and is a good element you may want to incorporate. Google Calendar now features a new scheduler view and can now help you fill in your calendar with suggestions thanks to the new assist feature.

Mizuu

The Mizuu media player is another great example of material design. The bold use of purple in the header, the floating action button to play movies, and the slide out panel with the hamburger icon are all there. Mizuu essentially just a media center application that indexes movie or tv show files that are kept stored in your phone or tablet's hard drive.

Orpheus Music Player

Orpheus has done a great job designing an app that has plenty of material design elements. The floating action button is present, and the headers are filled with vibrant color which can be changed to suit the users taste using the different color themes. It features remote player via Chromecast, a sleep timer, and many other great functions.

Google Play Music

Like many of Google's other apps, Google Play Music has lots of material design charm from head to toe. It plays music from your library in the cloud, includes music streaming with the subscription, and features tons of music to discover from the hundreds of thousands of songs and artists that are listed with new music added consistently.

MyStocks

MyStocks is a great display of the beauty and vibrancy of material design with understated simplicity. The app features real-time data of quotes and stocks and it syncs with Android Wear so it can be glanced at quickly. You can view detailed and descriptive data on financial information and quotes, and even check things from the lockscreen with the Dashclock extensions.

Wunderlist

wunderlist was already a great to-do list and task list application before but now it's been updated with material design style in the user interface. It features most of the elements found within material design like the floating action button and the deeper headers, and is a good example of how material design can be implemented with a little bit of uniqueness.

Reddit News

If you're looking to create a news application, Reddit News is a great example of inspiration for building something with material design. There's a use of just enough color without overdoing it and plenty of functionality like the hamburger menu off to the side, and multiple color theme options to give each user a little bit of control over their personal perference. Reddit News is just like it sounds, an app interface for catching up on your favorite reddits and subreddits.

Hall – Team Communication App

Just because Hall is all about team communication and productivity, doesn't mean that it can't look good while serving its purpose. Material design is alive and well within this app right down to the main elements like the hamburger menu, the floating action button, and the colored header up top.

OKCupid Dating

Even dating apps like OKCupid have embraced the nature of material design. In an age of modern technology and a completely interconnected society, OKCupid utilizes all of Google's modern design guidelines so the UI matches up with the modernness of the idea of connecting and finding relationships online.

Google Play Newsstand

Google's Play Newsstand app is another wonderful example of how to utilize material design. The deep colored headers are there, but instead of leaving things as just a simple flat color Google has placed the color as an overlay on top of backdrop images that correspond to stories within the main category page.

Indiegogo

Indiegogo is crowd-funded campaign app, and the general color scheme for the site lends itself unconditionally to the use of material design. The pink accents are applied to the header bar up top but then switch down to the bottom when entering into a specific campaign, where you also find the floating action button that's used to contribute.

Shazam

Shazam is an app used for music discovery when you hear a song playing and you aren't quite sure what it is. The new app UI features loads of material design with blue header bars, and matching blue accents throughout the app with floating action button and other elements in different pages of the app.

Hangouts

Hangouts is another Google application which can be used as a great reference for when designing an app with material design. This chat app has a vibrant green header bar up top and the hamburger menu off to the side, with seamless sliding menus between contacts, message threads and the dialer menu as well.

Asparagus

Asparagus looks good on multiple levels. It's a cookbook app that allows you to discover and store recipes, some with huge gorgeous images picturing some delicious looking meals. It also utilizes material design quite well by incorporating all the major elements like the floating action button, the hamburger menu, and color accents used for the theme of the app.

Pocket

Pocket is a reader application that lets you store news articles, videos and more all in one place so you can come back to them and read them later should not have time when you discover them. It utilizes material design even if a little more modestly than other apps in this list, but can still be used a good reference for using Google's new design guidelines.

Evernote

Evernote is one of the better examples of material design at its pique. It may be a simple cloud based note application at its core, but its design is anything but simple as it utilizes the vibrant color, floating action button, the hamburger menu, even the lively animations that are outlined by Google for material design. If you're looking to design an app with material design from top to bottom, Evernote should inspire.