Material Design Snackbar using the design support library

A Snackbar is a lightweight material design method for providing feedback to a user, while optionally providing an action to the user. They are displayed on the screen until a specified interval has passed, the user swipes to dismiss them, or when the user interacts with another part of the screen. Think of it as a modern take on the Android Toast.

This week at Google I/O 2015 the Android Design Support Library was released including a Snackbar implementation. Before now implementing and following the material guidelines for a Snackbar was left to the developer. A few third party libraries were released to make developers lives easier, but now official support for Snackbar has been introduced to make it easier than ever to add a Snackbar to your Android app.

Support for Snackbar pre-lollipop

While the Snackbar concept was introduced with the material design guidelines, the newly released Android Design Support Library works with devices right back to Android 2.1 (API 7). That is over 99% of active Android devices.

Material design specification for Snackbars

Many of the design rules for Snackbars are automatically enforced by the new support library. For example, if you provide lower case text for the action button it will automatically be displayed in upper case. However you still should brush up on the exact guidelines to know the best practices and what you can and can not do with a Snackbar. Take a look at the specification for full details.

A summary of the guidelines are:

• Content: Keep text short
• Icons: Do not add icons
• Core functionality: Do not place core app functionality into a Snackbar
• Multiple Actions: Use a dialog if you have multiple actions
• Input: Snackbar does not block input, use a dialog for this
• FAB: Don’t block the floating action button (FAB)
• Consecutive: Only one can be displayed on the screen at any time
• Single-line height: 48dp
• Multi-line height: 80dp
• Font: Roboto Regular 14sp
• Action button: Roboto Medium 14sp, all-caps text
• Default background fill: #323232 100%
• Width on Tablets: Minimum 288dp, maximum 568dp

Adding a Snackbar to your app

Firstly you will need to add the Android Design Support Library dependency to your gradle build script:

compile 'com.android.support:design:22.2.1'