How to customize the back button on ActionBar

android android-actionbar
Sunil Gowda picture Sunil Gowda · Feb 12, 2012 · Viewed 194.1k times · Source

I have been able to customize the action bar's background, logo image and text color using suggestions from these:
Android: How to change the ActionBar "Home" Icon to be something other than the app icon?
ActionBar text color
ActionBar background image

The last piece I want to customize is the back button image. It's grey by default and I would like it to be white. Either changing the color, specifying a drawable or simply making it transparent (and adding the chevron to my customized logo image) would work. How do I go about that?

Answer

Jake Wharton picture Jake Wharton · Feb 13, 2012

The "up" affordance indicator is provided by a drawable specified in the homeAsUpIndicator attribute of the theme. To override it with your own custom version it would be something like this:

<style name="Theme.MyFancyTheme" parent="android:Theme.Holo">
    <item name="android:homeAsUpIndicator">@drawable/my_fancy_up_indicator</item>
</style>

If you are supporting pre-3.0 with your application be sure you put this version of the custom theme in values-v11 or similar.

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