Apply tint to PreferenceActivity widgets with AppCompat v21

Question

I'm using CheckboxPreference in a PreferenceActivity and an AppCompat theme from the v21 support library. As you already know, with this latest library widgets like checkboxes, editTexts, radio buttons etc are tinted with the secondary color defined in the theme. In the preference screen, text is in the right color as specifified by my theme, but checkboxes and edittext are not. It seems that when the CheckboxPreference instance creates the widget, it doesn't apply my theme to it.

Radio buttons in a normal layout, tinted:

Checkbox from the CheckboxPreference, not tinted:

I'm using as the parent theme Theme.AppCompat.Light.NoActionBar. This happens to every subclass of Preference with a widget, like EditTextPreference to say one, where the EditText has a black bottom line, instead of a tinted line. How can I apply the tint to the widgets shown by the Preference subclasses?

UPDATE: tinting is not applied because PreferenceActivity extends the framework Activity. In the working case, I'm using an ActionBarActivity from the support library. Now the question is: how come?

Answer 1

So far, my own (sad) workaround was to create from scratch my own checkbox drawables, using the colors which the checkbox should have been tinted with in the first place.

In styles.xml:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<style name="AppThemeBase" parent="Theme.AppCompat.Light.NoActionBar">
...
<!-- edit the checkbox appearance -->
<item name="android:listChoiceIndicatorMultiple">@drawable/my_checkbox</item>
...
</style>

drawable/my_checkbox.xml:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<selector xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android">
    <item android:state_checked="true" android:drawable="@drawable/checkbox_on" />
    <item android:drawable="@drawable/checkbox_off" />
</selector>

checkbox_on" andcheckbox_off` are the PNG drawables for the selected and unselected states, obviously one for each screen density. If you mind dimension consistency, the baseline (MDPI) dimension of the drawables should be 32px full asset and 18px optical square.