Material TV

Televisions offer an exciting challenge for developers and designers alike. Most large screens are designed to be viewed from up to 10 feet away, and the controls differ from the touchscreens that we are used to dealing with. The interface too is very different, with the toolbar being replaced by a sidebar index or browse lane, and the content being represented in rows of categories. These two elements move in tandem with each other; the lane slides upward as each row is highlighted as shown in the following image:

Most Android TV apps take advantage of the Leanback Library, which provides numerous widgets specifically designed for TV, along with the Leanback theme, which is a TV-optimized version of the material theme.

Note

The Leanback Library is a v17 library, which means it will only work with API levels of 17 (Android 4.2.2) or higher.

The sheer size of today's televisions allows us to represent our apps graphically with far more than a simple icon, and TV apps allow a 320 x...