Changing the default dark Android theme to white in Xamarin.Forms?

Question

Xamarin.Forms does generate a greyish Android application. I'd like to have a light / white theme in Android (like in the iOS target).

Does a simple way to switch exist?

Solution 1

You can put Theme parameter to ApplicationAttribute of your main activity

like this

[assembly: Application(Icon = "@drawable/Icon", Theme = "@android:style/Theme.Holo.Light")]

Or you can put this string to AndroidManifest.xml

<application android:theme="@android:style/Theme.Holo.Light" />

Solution 2

The answer from ad1Dima got me most of the way there, but I found that in my environment I needed something slightly different. This is what I put in my 'MainActivity.cs' file to change the theme.

    [Activity( Theme="@android:style/Theme.Holo.Light",Label = "HealthTechnologies", MainLauncher = true, ConfigurationChanges = ConfigChanges.ScreenSize | ConfigChanges.Orientation)]
    public class MainActivity : AndroidActivity

Note that the only thing that was new here was the addition of the 'Theme=...'. Everything else was already in the MainActivity.cs file.

Comments

[SteAp]

Great! But then another question comes up: stackoverflow.com/questions/24173718/…

[MelloG]

And how would it behave on the other application types, considering that forms is designed to be for Android, iOS and Windows Phone

[ad1Dima]

@MelloG it has only android effect and no effect on other platforms.

[JustAMartin]

And what if I don't want to enforce the theme but instead be consistent with current Android theme on user's device? Is there any way to say to my app (and especially Xamarin.Forms app) to sync to the system theme?

[ad1Dima]

@JustAMartin not tested, but Theme.DeviceDefault should be your case developer.android.com/reference/android/…