Although Material design is by no means essential, and can be ignored entirely if you are developing full-screen apps such as games, which often come with their own design rules, it is nevertheless an elegant design paradigm and is widely recognized and understood by the user base.
One very good reason for implementing Material is that many of its features, such as card views and sliding drawers, can be applied with great ease, thanks to the associated support libraries.
One of the first design decisions we need to take is what color scheme, or theme, we want to apply to our app. There are one or two material guidelines regarding the shade and contrast of our themes. Fortunately, Android Studio's Theme Editor makes generating material-compliant themes very simple indeed.