🕐 Revisited — 📚 A Guide on Splash Screen in Android in 2020
👀 A fresh look on the splash screen in Android in Kotlin and Coroutines
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Splash screen is a very popular methodology in Android app development. Almost all major apps contain some sort of splash screen for many different reasons from brand awareness to loading heavy resources before app start. Some apps even add splash screens just because everyone else is adding it to follow the paradigm, even though their apps don’t need it.
Its a very debatable topic on whether apps should contain splash screen or not as this wastes few (important) seconds of user’s time. In this article, we will not be focusing on that debate. Rather, this topic is about technical details on creating splash screens with the modern Android development approaches followed in 2019 or upcoming 2020. So, without further ado, let’s start ordering from the old way to new way.
🎨 Using Activity Theme
When any app is launched, Android system will try to draw the first screen as fast as it can. But for the new launches, this may take few moments. During these moments, Android by default shows a empty placeholder screen filled with your app’s windowBackgroundcolor. You can extend this placeholder from just a color to your splash screen using the Activity theme approach.
Create a separate theme for your splash Activity and set its windowBackground to your custom splash drawable.
You can see that we have set windowBackground to our splash screen drawable in file splash_drawable.xml file. Here’s that file.
Now, set this theme to your splash Activity in the AndroidManifest.xml file.
