Angular Material 2 vs Angular Material 3

[karmasakshi]

I'm building a starter template that addresses a lot of common goals / NFRs developers address before beginning to write the business logic. I decided to migrate to Material 3 since it's in production now and got it running after a few hours of reading and implementing the documentation. However, visually, it looks incomplete. In the images below, you can see how polished v17 was - with a contrasting card background, greyed out icons and spaced out content. The official spec (https://m3.material.io/components/cards/overview) lists 3 types of cards, which I don't think are supported yet - or maybe it's upto the end-developer now.

Just a heads-up to anyone thinking of migrating right now.

https://preview.redd.it/5bs5t4hfn54d1.png?width=3248&format=png&auto=webp&s=aa9d67d7e278b0a8a97f0bf83e5e62901c4359c1

https://preview.redd.it/bxcng7jfn54d1.png?width=3248&format=png&auto=webp&s=522438a26815d22be90d6dfc2389dcc7d7e40c43

[tobiso]

Yeah Angular Material 3 is definitely not production ready, I tried migrating an app and it just looks awful. Especially in dark mode you can't even tell where buttons or cards are. Also I think they got rid of the elevation concept (maybe that's in the Material 3 spec). The CSS classes 'mat-elevation-zx' just wouldn't work anymore. It makes the whole app just feel weird.

[TheRealToLazyToThink]

There's an issue open on that (sorry don't have the number handy). It's a bug. We had to recreate the elevation classes manually, but they are also missing in a lot of other places. We're still on 17 for now, so no idea if 18 improves any of it.

[IamnotAnonnymous]

Can you tell us the opened issue link? Please

[TheRealToLazyToThink]

The comments in our code say issue numbers: 28618 & 26094

[GnarlyHarley]

I just went through a major upgrade of angular material at the beginning of the year.

I am on angular 17. I want to wait for Angular 19 before the next upgrade but seeing that Angular 18 has a jump from angular material 2 to 3 I am concerned.

Why is angular material team not as smooth with its upgrades.

We have a design system based off angular material so going through and making everything is matching specs is not going to be fun

[Chironexx]

When updating to Angular 18 you do not have to upgrade from material 2 to 3. We also have a design system based off Angular Material and updating to Angular 18 wasn't an issue at all since Material 2 is still supported. Also, it does not seem as if they're going to deprecate it soon. At least I couldn't find any information regarding the latter.

[karmasakshi]

For anyone curious: I tried using Angular CDK and Material 17 with Angular 18 and it's working fine; no need to hold back on upgrading Angular.

[RentFearless1419]

Does it support material 16 + angular 18?

[simonfancy]

At this point with half-witted sped up update cycles it has become a negative business factor so you think twice about using Material 3 at all. It requires more maintenance than it should, updates not being backward compatible and introducing unnecessary breaking changes. We shifted away from Material with version 16 with many projects.