Remove Android Activity Title and Icon

Aug 5, 2013 · Follow on Twitter and Mastodon android

My getting-to-know-and-to-love Android journey continues, and has come to themes. This morning, I’ve been learning how to use themes to customize the main action bar.

Image of an Android teacher

I first removed the action bar icon and title by running this in my start activity’s onCreate:

ActionBar actionBar = getActionBar();
actionBar.setDisplayShowHomeEnabled(false);
actionBar.setDisplayShowTitleEnabled(false);

This works, but causes the icon and title to be removed with a small delay. You will see the icon and title while the activity loads, after which they fade away.

A better way to achieve this is to remove the icon and title with themes instead of with code. I removed the code above and did the following instead.

Create a default action bar style (optional)

You don’t have to, but I think that having a default action bar style is more consistent than just adding one for action bars without the icon and title.

In styles.xml, I added the following line to my app theme:

<style name="AppTheme" parent="AppBaseTheme">
    <item name="android:actionBarStyle">@style/ActionBar</item>
    ...any additional theme styles here
</style>

I then added the ActionBar style, which looks like this:

<style name="ActionBar" parent="android:Widget.Holo.Light.ActionBar.Solid.Inverse">
    <item name="android:background">...any color or image here...</item>
</style>

I use the theme convention created by Android Studio, which creates an AppBaseTheme as well as an AppTheme that inherits it. This makes it easy to customize your action bar.

Create a second style without icon and title

With the base theme in place, let’s create an app theme without a title and icon. Below the AppTheme style tag, add this inheriting style:

<style name="AppThemeWithoutActionBarTitle" parent="AppTheme">
    <item name="android:actionBarStyle">@style/ActionBarWithoutTitle</item>
</style>

as well as a new action bar style:

<style name="ActionBarWithoutTitle" parent="@style/ActionBar">
    <item name="android:displayOptions">useLogo</item>
</style>

Apply the new action bar style

To apply a style, open the manifest file and add this to the activities that should use it:

android:theme="@style/AppThemeWithoutActionBarTitle"

After this, the affected activities should no longer display an title or icon.

Discussions & More

Please share any ideas, feedback or comments you may have in the Disqus section below, or by replying on Twitter or Mastodon.

If you found this text interesting, make sure to follow me on Twitter and Mastodon for more content like this, and to be notified when new content is published.

If you like & want to support my work, please consider sponsoring me on GitHub Sponsors.