Android - how to set background color of all screens?

Question

What is the best practice to maintain styles of fonts and colors. I made a colors.xml file which I have used to change colors on seperate elements like buttons, but I am not sure how Android wants developers to organize their styles.

For example, I would like all screens to have the same background color. How do I do that? Is it something I need to specify for each Activity layout xml? Or elsewhere? How do I accomplish it?

Answer 1

A quick and easy way to make sure every activity has the same background color, is to create a theme for your activities to use. That theme would specify the android:windowBackground.

First define the color in values/colors.xml

<resources>
    <color name="background">#FF0000 </color>
</resources>

Create a themes.xml file in res/values that references that color:

<resources>
 <style name="MyTheme" parent="@android:style/Theme.Light"> 
  <item name="android:windowBackground">@color/background</item>
 </style>
</resources>

... and then in your AndroidManifest.xml specify this as the theme for your activities to use.

 <activity
        android:name=".MyActivity"
        android:theme="@style/MyTheme" />