Android Support

[Jack M]

Hi I'm Jack and I'm a Web, Game and App Developer, working with various Tools and Frameworks, like Phonegap, Bootstrap, jQuery, Intel App Framework, jQuery Mobile, CocoonJS, Unity 3D and etc. I'm also interested in the Polymer Project, I am fan of Flat Design and now in Material Design, I have some questions about Polymer Project:

1. With which Android version is Polymer Project Compatible?

2. If the Android support is only Android 4.4 and above, will using the new Chromium WebView in Crosswalk and CocoonJS WebView+ Feature?

3. Why Lower Android versions aren't supported, because of the new import feature, Javascript or?

Thanks...

Regards,

Jack.

[Rob Dodson]

1. With which Android version is Polymer Project Compatible?

4.4+

2. If the Android support is only Android 4.4 and above, will using the new Chromium WebView in Crosswalk and CocoonJS WebView+ Feature?

We've heard from a number of developers that Crosswalk works really well with Polymer and can improve support for older android devices. I'm not an expert on Crosswalk but I believe their docs say they support Android 4.0+

3. Why Lower Android versions aren't supported, because of the new import feature, Javascript or?

My understanding is that there are some bits which are hard/impossible to polyfill. Particularly around things like Shadow DOM. If you don't use Shadow DOM, and instead focus on Custom Elements, it's possible to get things working in even older browsers. TJ VanToll did a nice write up on this.

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[Jack M]

Thanks for the quick respond, my primary target is the Material Design, so I was thinking, that because Polymer is only supported in Android 4.4+ because of the Chromium which is default in that version, we could use Crosswalk or WebView+ to make Polymer work on Android 4.0+, also as I said my focus is on the Material Design, so because the project is on GitHub I was planning to examine the code to get only the Material Design and make it work on Android 4.0+ if the Crosswalk doesn't work...so my last question is:

1. Does the Material Design has code which is not compatible with Android 4.3 and below, I'm speaking only about the Material Design not the ability of creating custom elements!

Regards,

Jack.

[Rob Dodson]

1. Does the Material Design has code which is not compatible with Android 4.3 and below, I'm speaking only about the Material Design not the ability of creating custom elements!

I think the best answer is, "sort of".  We use CSS selectors like :host, :host-context, ::shadow, and /deep/ because we're writing our styles assuming the presence of Shadow DOM. It's really easy to convert these styles so they work with old browsers (for instance, you can often replace ::shadow and /deep/ with descendant selectors) but it does require a bit of manual work. There are folks working on a version of Material Design that is targeted at legacy browsers but I don't know the official status of that. 

[Jack M]

Ok Rob thanks again for the reply, and I'm glad that someone is already working on this, the Material Design will be very helpful for the Phonegap Framework....

Regards,

Jack.