How to _really_ programmatically change primary and accent color in Android Lollipop?

nhaarman picture nhaarman · Sep 12, 2014 · Viewed 107.9k times · Source

First of all, this question asks a very similar question. However, my question has a subtle difference.

What I'd like to know is whether it is possible to programmatically change the colorPrimary attribute of a theme to an arbitrary color?

So for example, we have:

<style name="AppTheme" parent="android:Theme.Material.Light">
    <item name="android:colorPrimary">#ff0000</item>
    <item name="android:colorAccent">#ff0000</item>
</style>

At runtime, the user decides he wants to use #ccffff as a primary color. Ofcourse there's no way I can create themes for all possible colors.

I don't mind if I have to do hacky stuff, like relying on Android's private internals, as long as it works using the public SDK.

My goal is to eventually have the ActionBar and all widgets like a CheckBox to use this primary color.

Answer

Chris Banes picture Chris Banes · Oct 22, 2014

Themes are immutable, you can't.