Android Selector Drawable with VectorDrawables srcCompat

Question

I'm facing a problem with the new backward compatibility with VectorDrawables. In the Support Library 23.2 was a new feature for backward compatibility with Android VectorDrawables indroduced.

I have an ImageView which is a SelectorDrawable assigned to. This Drawable holds several VectorDrawables so I thought I should use app:srcCompat for compatibility. But it does not work on my Galaxy S2 with android 4.1.2.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<selector xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android">
    <item android:drawable="@drawable/ic_gps_fixed_24dp"android:state_activated="true" android:state_selected="true"></item>
    <item android:drawable="@drawable/ic_gps_not_fixed_24dp" android:state_activated="true" android:state_selected="false"></item>
    <item android:drawable="@drawable/ic_gps_not_fixed_24dp" android:state_activated="false" android:state_selected="true"></item>
    <item android:drawable="@drawable/ic_gps_off_24dp" android:state_activated="false" android:state_selected="false"></item>
    <item android:drawable="@drawable/ic_gps_not_fixed_24dp"></item>
</selector>

All drawables are vector xml files.

When using this SelectorDrawable with srcCompat I get this error:

  Caused by: android.content.res.Resources$NotFoundException: File res/drawable/  Caused by: android.content.res.Resources$NotFoundException: File res/drawable/ic_gps_fixed_24dp.xml from drawable resource ID #0x7f0201c1
                                                                           at android.content.res.Resources.loadDrawable(Resources.java:1951)
                                                                           at android.content.res.Resources.getDrawable(Resources.java:672)
                                                                           at android.graphics.drawable.StateListDrawable.inflate(StateListDrawable.java:173)
                                                                           at android.graphics.drawable.Drawable.createFromXmlInner(Drawable.java:881).xml from drawable resource ID #0x7f0201c1

using android:src is even worse.

If I use one of the vector drawables with app:srcCompat all works fine. So I guess it's a problem with the SelectorDrawable and compatibility.

Has anyone had the same problem and found a solution or is it currently not possible to use VectorDrawables in SelectorDrawables prior to Android 5?

The Quick Facts:

• Compile Target API 23
• Support Libraray 23.3.0
• vectorDrawables.useSupportLibrary = true
• Gradle 2.0

Answer 1

Some things have changed since I asked this question, so I will answer it myself.

With Support Library 23.4.0 the support for VectorDrawables from Ressources was reenabled: Android Support Library 23.4.0 available now

You can find more information on that in this cast from the Google I/O 2016: What's new in the support library - Google I/O 2016

You need to add this to every Activity where you want to use VectorDrawables on devices below Android 5.0 (Codename Lollipop, API level 21):

static {
    AppCompatDelegate.setCompatVectorFromResourcesEnabled(true);
}

So you can now use VectorDrawables in DrawableContainers but it can still cause some issues as mentioned in the sources above so use it with caution.

I did not reenable this feature in my app so far but I will change a lot of my icons to VectorDrawables with my next major release and will then dive deeper into this topic.