Adding a splash screen to Xamarin Forms apps

Every Xamarin Forms app should ship with a splash screen, it is the first thing a user see and it contributes to reduce the perceived application boot time.

Adding one is quite easy, let’s go from simpler to harder.

The simpler: Windows Phone

Just replace SplashScreenImage.jpg (720x1280 pixels) with your own app launch image in the Windows Phone project and you’re done.

The harder: iOS

If you follow iOS documentation you’ll know that adding your own launch screen is just a matter of adding the proper images to the project via info.pList options.

unfortunately once you do that you’ll still see the blue background with Xamarin Logo at startup, to fix it delete the content of Launch Storyboard option into info.pList and you’re done (no idea why template adds that storyboard inside Resources folder)

The hardest: Android

Adding a splash screen requires following steps:

1-Add the splash screen image into Resources\drawable folder (and all the variants you want to support) in previous screenshot file is named splash.png

2-Create a new folder under Resources and name it values

3-Add an xml file into values folder (name is not important, in my case I named it Styles.xml)

4-Add this content to xml file

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<resources>
    <style name="Theme.Splash" parent="android:Theme">
        <item name="android:windowBackground">@drawable/splash</item>
        <item name="android:windowNoTitle">true</item>
    </style>
</resources>

5-Add a new activity to the project and add this code (of course you can safely remove the delay before StartActivity method)

[Activity(Theme = "@style/Theme.Splash", //Indicates the theme to use for this activity
             MainLauncher = true, //Set it as boot activity
             NoHistory = true)] //Doesn't place it in back stack
    public class SplashActivity : Activity
    {
        protected override void OnCreate(Bundle bundle)
        {
            base.OnCreate(bundle);
            System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(3000); //Let's wait awhile...
            this.StartActivity(typeof(MainActivity));
        }
    }

6-Remove the MainLauncher=true from original activity since this is the new activity that will be launched at startup.

Hope this helps…