Intro

This is a quick article presenting very common neglect in creating application start on Android nowadays, and of course, simple and relevant solution.

Recently Google Design web page shows guidelines about launch screens (click). Personally I hate splash screens and it bugs me when they start to appear in products like Maps, Youtube or others. But this is not the topic I would like to touch here. Second described way of launching an application is Placeholder UI, or Starting Window.

Example shows a standard material screen with extended Toolbar, probably containing title, action buttons and few tabs. Unfortunately, there is no information of how to achieve this. But I remember an excellent article written by Cyril Mottier:

Basically creating perfect preview window doesn’t require any addition work from developers if they are using android themes right. It was true for long time. But after more and more application started adopting Material Design, this effect suddenly disappeared.

Launch experience of some popular applications:

Gmail

Hangouts

So, I switched myself into investigation mode and found two potentially guilty guys.