How to make a splash screen like Youtube on Android?

The reason why I’m writing this post is a lot of people don't know how to create a splash screen. I’ve seen people creating a separate activity and fragments, I have seen people even creating views and hiding them after a few seconds.

I see these and think to my self why??

Let's start with the basics. What is a Splash Screen?

A splash screen is a simple minimalistic screen containing only a logo and the app version if you want to be a nerd. This special screen appears only while launching an app or a game. Usually to avoid that annoying blank screen while the app loads. Trust me no one wants to see a blank screen while launching an app.

Now that we know what a splash screen is! let's make one and what better way to do this than implementing something similar to the Youtube apps splash screen.

This can be achieved easily with a single activity and without having to toggle the views and no need for separate splash screen activity to achieve this.

Enough talk! where is the code?

Let's start by creating a drawable which will act as a logo for our app. I’m going to call this

ic_splash_background.xml

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

this will serve as the background of the activity while it is loaded. The bitmap will just contain your logo. It could be a png, jpg or any other image file.

Next, you will need to create a style for your launcher activity which will show the logo while the activity loads. So head over to your styles.xml and create a new style that extends the AppTheme.

<style name="SplashTheme" parent="AppTheme">
  <item name="android:windowBackground">@drawable/ic_splash_background</item>
</style>

once you have the style all you need to do is apply it to the launcher activity likewise.

<activity
  android:name=".MainActivity"
  android:theme="@style/SplashTheme">
  <intent-filter>
    <action android:name="android.intent.action.MAIN" />

    <category android:name="android.intent.category.LAUNCHER" />
  </intent-filter>
</activity>

Final step just set a background colour to your launcher activities layout and you are all set.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<androidx.constraintlayout.widget.ConstraintLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
  xmlns:app="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res-auto"
  xmlns:tools="http://schemas.android.com/tools"
  android:layout_width="match_parent"
  android:layout_height="match_parent"
  android:background="@color/colorActivityBackground"
  tools:context=".MainActivity">

  <TextView
    android:layout_width="wrap_content"
    android:layout_height="wrap_content"
    android:text="Hello World!"
    android:textColor="@android:color/white"
    app:layout_constraintBottom_toBottomOf="parent"
    app:layout_constraintLeft_toLeftOf="parent"
    app:layout_constraintRight_toRightOf="parent"
    app:layout_constraintTop_toTopOf="parent" />

</androidx.constraintlayout.widget.ConstraintLayout>

And that my friend is how you create a proper splash screen in android. So now when you launch your app it will show a nice little logo before it starts while the app loads instead of the plain empty screen.

You can check the sample code here

mukeshsolanki/android-splash-screen-example