How to Create a Splash Screen

Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash

What’s a Splash screen?

It’s a start up screen that is displayed while an android app loads in the background. It can contain your app’s logo and/or name.

There are different ways of creating a splash screen like using timers with an extra activity, but this method can cause the splash screen to display more than necessary. Here, I’ll show you a more appropriate method, using the app’s launcher theme on Android Studio.

• First we want to create a drawable resource file containing the logo and the background color. Add the file in the res/drawable folder.

Create a Drawable Resource File

Ensure you use a layer-list tag to contain your drawable files.

• Next we want to define a theme for the splash screen in theme.xml (in the res/values/themes folder).

Open themes.xml

Here you specify your drawable resource file as your android:windowBackground. In this example, I’ll name my theme “splashScreenExampleTheme”.

• Set the app’s the launcher theme to the splash screen theme in AndroidManifest.xml using android:theme in the application tag.

AndroidManifest.xml

• Finally, in your main activity, set the launcher theme back to the app’s default theme, using thesetTheme() function before super.onCreate(savedInstanceState), like so…

Result…

And we’re done!

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