Remove Android Activity Title and Icon

Aug 5, 2013 · 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.

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