Supporting Android material design

According to Android Material Design compatibility docs

I'm going to rehash the material here incase the link gets taken down, which most likely it will be in the near future.

For the Material theme

The material theme is only available in the Android L Developer Preview. To configure your app to use the material theme on devices running the Android L Developer Preview and an older theme on devices running earlier versions of Android:

Define a theme that inherits from an older theme (like Holo) in res/values/styles.xml. Define a theme with the same name that inherits from the material theme in res/values-v21/styles.xml. Set this theme as your app's theme in the manifest file.

As for layouts

If the layouts that you design according to the material design guidelines do not use any of the new XML attributes from the Android L Developer Preview, they will work on previous versions of Android. Otherwise, you can provide alternative layouts. You can also provide alternative layouts to customize how your app looks on earlier versions of Android.

Create your layout files for the Android L Developer Preview inside res/layout-v21/ and your alternative layout files for earlier versions of Android inside res/layout/. Alternative layouts have the same file name.

To avoid duplication of code, define your styles inside res/values/ and modify the styles in res/values-v21/ for the new APIs.

For UI Widgets

The RecyclerView and CardView widgets are included in the Android L Developer Preview Support Library, so they are available in earlier versions of Android with these limitations:

CardView falls back to a programmatic shadow implementation using additional padding. CardView does not clip its children views that intersect with rounded corners. These limitations do not apply to the Android L Developer Preview.

and lastly for Animations

The following new APIs are only available in the Android L Developer Preview:

Activity transitions, Touch feedback, Reveal animations, Path-based animations. To preserve compatibility with earlier verisons of Android, check the system version at runtime before you invoke these APIs.

The v7 Support Libraries r21 and above includes the following material design features:

• Material design styles for some system widgets when you apply one of the Theme.AppCompat themes.

• Color palette theme attributes in the Theme.AppCompat themes.

• The RecyclerView widget to display data collections.
• The CardView widget to create cards. The Palette class to extract prominent colors from images.

The following features are available only in Android 5.0 (API level 21) and above:

• Activity transitions

• Touch feedback

• Reveal animations

• Path-based animations

• Vector drawables

• Drawable tinting

Hence you can use some third party library available for Touch feedback. And can use custom activity transition animation. I have done custom activity transition animation. you can find my app on this link .You can find youtube video of devebyte on custom activity transition.