Maintaining backward compatibility with Material Design

Question

I'm trying to implement an activity that has the Material Design tinted title bar.

My standard style is:

<style name="AppTheme" parent="Theme.AppCompat.Light.DarkActionBar">
</style>

My v21 style is:

<style name="AppTheme" parent=" -see rest of this post- ">
    <item name="android:colorPrimary">@color/primary</item>
    <item name="android:colorPrimaryDark">@color/primary_dark</item>
    <item name="android:colorAccent">@color/accent</item>
</style>

and the results I get are:

API 18:
MyActivity extends AppCompatActivity
-- Black title bar, this is good enough.
MyActivity extends Activity:
-- No title bar.
API 21:
MyActivity extends Activity, parent="android:Theme.Material.Light"
-- Perfect green tinting of status bar and title bar.
MyActivity extends AppCompatActivity, parent="android:Theme.Material.Light"
-- Crashes with: You need to use a Theme.AppCompat theme (or descendant) with this activity.
MyActivity extends AppCompatActivity, parent="Theme.AppCompat.Light"
-- Status bar is correctly green tinted. Title bar has no background colour.
MyActivity extends AppCompatActivity, parent="Theme.AppCompat.Light.DarkActionBar"
-- Status bar is correctly green tinted. Title bar has black background colour.

How do I get the coloured title bar in Lollipop and an acceptable one pre-Lollipop? I know with extra work I can have a coloured pre-lollipop title bar, but that is not needed at this time.

Appologies, I was not sure of the best way to format the results, I really needed a table. — Steve Waring, May 06 '15 at 23:28

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered May 06 '15 at 23:42

3

You should be using the non-android namespaced properties with the support library:

<style name="AppTheme" parent="Theme.AppCompat.Light">
    <item name="colorPrimary">@color/primary</item>
    <item name="colorPrimaryDark">@color/primary_dark</item>
    <item name="colorAccent">@color/accent</item>
</style>

No v21 version required. This will give you consistent behavior back to API level 7

answered May 06 '15 at 23:42

tachyonflux

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That is the same as saying that one should not develop against the Lollipop APIs but stick with the compatibility libraries for now. There is no viable way to provide code for both pre-v21 and 21+ – Glenn Bech Jul 12 '15 at 14:21

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered May 06 '15 at 23:43

If you are using AppCompat, then all of the material color palette attributes (such as colorPrimary) are available to all API levels, so you can write a single theme:

<style name="AppTheme" parent="Theme.AppCompat.Light.DarkActionBar">
    <item name="colorPrimary">@color/primary</item>
    <item name="colorPrimaryDark">@color/primary_dark</item>
    <item name="colorAccent">@color/accent</item>
</style>

And use AppCompatActivity for all of your activities as per the Consistent Design with AppCompat DevByte. This will give you an action bar with colorPrimary on all API7+ devices, a status bar of colorPrimaryDark on API21+ devices (older devices do not support colored status bars), and light text on your action bar (use Theme.AppCompat.Light if you want dark text on your action bar).

Maintaining backward compatibility with Material Design

2 Answers2

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