Bottom Navigation Bars

Introduction

Bottom navigation bars enable switching between views with a single tap and should be used in applications with multiple top-level destinations. The recommended number of destinations for bottom navigation bars is between three and five. We’ll be using Android’s material design library by Google to add a bottom navigation bar.

Let’s jump right in and learn how to create and use a bottom navigation bar in an Android application.

Add the library dependency

To start off, make sure the material design library dependency is added in our app/build.gradle file.

implementation 'com.google.android.material:material:1.4.0'

Note: In a local development environment, a gradle sync should be performed after adding the dependency so that the source for the library is downloaded.

Define the layout

We need to create a menu resource file containing the tab names and icons for the navigation bar. We can create a menu_bottom_navigation_bar.xml file inside the res/menu directory. Let’s add the following code to the menu resource file for creating a menu with four tabs.