This is a very common scenario and luckily Android offers a pretty powerful mechanism via themes. Let's assume we want to change the text size and color on all of our TextViews and don't want to set it explicitly on every TextView. To reference this style in our layout.xml files we use The style declaration references a parent style called Since the style reference begins with android: namespace, we know that it is one of the default styles shipped with the Android platform. Here is an example of how to set properties for a TextView in the res/values/styles.xml file. That means that we can only set a style once because the style properties are evaluated when the View is created/inflated. But be aware that a style can only be set in xml. Since this isn't very convenient when styling an entire application, we can create styles that bundle properties of view. The simplest way to declare the visual appearance in Android is to set properties directly on the View object.

More specifically I'll describe some useful patterns when applying heavier branding to your application.

Hierarchy of Needs (courtesy of the folks at Google)įor this post, I'll assume you have the ground covered in the 'Successful design' segment.

Android studio theme framework .