Android "elevation" Not Showing A Shadow
Answer : I've been playing around with shadows on Lollipop for a bit and this is what I've found: It appears that a parent ViewGroup 's bounds cutoff the shadow of its children for some reason; and shadows set with android:elevation are cutoff by the View 's bounds, not the bounds extended through the margin; the right way to get a child view to show shadow is to set padding on the parent and set android:clipToPadding="false" on that parent. Here's my suggestion to you based on what I know: Set your top-level RelativeLayout to have padding equal to the margins you've set on the relative layout that you want to show shadow; set android:clipToPadding="false" on the same RelativeLayout ; Remove the margin from the RelativeLayout that also has elevation set; [EDIT] you may also need to set a non-transparent background color on the child layout that needs elevation. At the end of the day, your top-level relative layout sho...