Material Design brought in a whole new look to android with 5.0 Lollipop. Motion design was big part of the story. Motion graphic design is a subset of graphic design in that it uses graphic design principles through the use of animation. According to the Material Design specifications, every state change should animate to and fro. If you have used lollipop, you know what I am referring to. But the only problem is everything doesn't animate yet and it leaves you wanting more. It hit me when I saw this dribble post from a Googler few months back. Yes, I am talking about smarter inter-app animations. Take for example maps app, go to some address, tap share and select an app to share and watch what happens. Did you notice?

The experience is very disconnected. There is no smooth animation between the apps. Source app is not aware of the destination app’s design elements. The handshake between 2 apps is rather rudimentary.

How should it actually happen?

Take for example, if address needs to be shared from Google Maps to Hangouts. In a smarter material world, this is how it should orchestrate itself :

On hitting the share button in maps app, viewport should seamlessly transform into a mini map card. Textual address should elegantly tween into a map pin, dropping from the top as it forms the entire shareable object.

Map card should then use the elevation API to float above the Maps app (as in image above) while Hangouts app is sliding from the bottom to take precedence.

While Map card is floating on top of sliding hangouts window, map card should start wrapping itself in hangout bubble, ready to be sent.

Last step is of course hitting the send button where it slides the map card wrapped in a bubble from the text area into the chat area.

Inter-app motion should sequence itself to make the experience of using multiple apps on the phone seamlessly invisible. Shorter term, Google can allow developers to expose their design elements within an activity to other apps and achieve seamless app switching.

Longer term, Android needs to be way smarter to know the design elements of each activity and then accordingly apply transform motion between activities. Is Google working on this? Most probably.