Right Way to create Splash Screen in Android

In this tutorial, we will learn how to create splash screen without creating splash screen activity. Splash Screen is the screen which you show before the start of the application. What happen some time your application have lots of coding stuff on your main activity and its take lots of time in loading the all these stuff like inflating your layout, downloading bitmap, music and other program logic, which create bad user experience to user because user see black screen until your application not finish with all coding stuff. So in this scenario Splash Screen is very useful where you show custom graphics to end user and create better user experience.

Initially, I have done lots stuff about creating splash screen by starting a light activity before main activity and putting some sleep inside that activity and then start the main activity, but I don't think that is the best way create a splash screen. Because in this case you are creating an activity just to show a graphics before your application start and user have to wait for few second whether they required or not. For example one device with more advance hardware that can load the all stuff within two seconds but still user has to wait for 10 sec because you have put 10-second sleep in your splash screen activity.

Finally, after doing lots of stuff, I saw a video of google to show the splash screen in right way and then I have implemented that and found yes this is the right way create the splash screen.

What we will do in this we create the custom theme and put our graphics inside that theme and set that theme for our main activity inside our AndroidManifest.xml file and in our main activity we change the theme just before the start of our main activity.

Please note I was showing you this example inside the app which we have created in our last post, you can refer it if you have not gone through the last tutorial.

Create drawable for splash screen

Right click on the drawable folder and select new and then drawable resource file and put the following code inside your resource file. You may need to change the logo name in your resource file or can download the logo from GitHub source code of this example,  link given at the end of this page.

splash.xml

 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>  
 <layer-list xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"  
 android:opacity="opaque">  
 <item  
   android:drawable="@color/transGray"/>  
 <item>  
   <bitmap  
     android:gravity="center"  
     android:src="@drawable/logo"/>  
 </item>  
 </layer-list>  

Create a customer Theme inside your style.xml file and set the above drawable as the background of the theme.

 <style name="AppTheme.Launcher">  
     <item name="android:windowBackground">@drawable/splash</item>  
   </style>  

Modify your AndroidManifest.xml and set the AppThem.Launcher as your main activity theme.

 <activity android:name=".MainActivity"  
       android:theme="@style/AppTheme.Launcher">  
       <intent-filter>  
         <action android:name="android.intent.action.MAIN" />  
         <category android:name="android.intent.category.LAUNCHER" />  
       </intent-filter>  
     </activity>  

We can run and test our application but you will get the same theme all over your activity which was not good. So for that we have to set our actually theme inside our activity. So open the MainActivity.java file and below line before you super.onCreate method called.

 setTheme(R.style.AppTheme);  
 super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);  

We are all set to test you similar to screen shots are given below.



You can download the source code from GitHub project page here.