Custom notification layouts and text colors

Question

My application shows some notifications, and depending on user preferences it might use a custom layout in a notification. It works well, but there is a small problem -- text colors. Stock Android and almost all manufacturer skins use black text against a light background for notification text, but Samsung doesn't: their notification pulldown has a dark background and the text in the default notification layout is white.

So this causes a problem: the notifications that don't use any fancy layouts show up fine, but the one that uses a custom layout is hard to read because the text is black instead of the default white. Even the official documentation just sets a #000 color for a TextView, so I couldn't find any pointers there.

A user was kind enough to take a screenshot of the problem:

So how do I use the default notification text color from the device in my layouts? I'd rather not start dynamically altering the text color based on phone model, since that requires a lot of updating and people with custom ROM's might still get the problem, depending on the skin they're using.

Answer 1

The solution is to use built-in styles. The style you need is called TextAppearance.StatusBar.EventContent in Android 2.3 and Android 4.x. In Android 5.x material notifications use several other styles: TextAppearance.Material.Notification, TextAppearance.Material.Notification.Title, and TextAppearance.Material.Notification.Line2. Just set the appropriate text appearance for the text view, and you will get the necessary colors.

If you are interested how I have arrived at this solution, here's my trail of breadcrumbs. The code excerpts are taken from Android 2.3.

1. When you use Notification and set the text by using built-in means, the following line creates the layout:

   RemoteViews contentView = new RemoteViews(context.getPackageName(),
           com.android.internal.R.layout.status_bar_latest_event_content);
   

2. The mentioned layout contains the following View which is responsible for viewing notification text:

   <TextView android:id="@+id/text"
       android:textAppearance="@style/TextAppearance.StatusBar.EventContent"
       android:layout_width="wrap_content"
       android:layout_height="wrap_content"
       android:layout_weight="1"
       android:singleLine="true"
       android:ellipsize="marquee"
       android:fadingEdge="horizontal"
       android:paddingLeft="4dp"
       />
   

3. So the conclusion is that the needed style is TextAppearance.StatusBar.EventContent, which definition looks like this:

   <style name="TextAppearance.StatusBar.EventContent">
       <item name="android:textColor">#ff6b6b6b</item>
   </style>
   

   You should note here that this style doesn't actually reference any of the built-in colors, so the safest way is to apply this style instead of some built-in color.

One more thing: before Android 2.3 (API Level 9), there were neither styles, nor colors, there were only hard-coded values. If you happen to have to support such old versions for some reason, see the answer by Gaks .