Maintaining backward compatibility with Material Design

Question

I'm trying to implement an activity that has the Material Design tinted title bar.

My standard style is:

<style name="AppTheme" parent="Theme.AppCompat.Light.DarkActionBar">
</style>

My v21 style is:

<style name="AppTheme" parent=" -see rest of this post- ">
    <item name="android:colorPrimary">@color/primary</item>
    <item name="android:colorPrimaryDark">@color/primary_dark</item>
    <item name="android:colorAccent">@color/accent</item>
</style>

and the results I get are:

API 18:
MyActivity extends AppCompatActivity
-- Black title bar, this is good enough.
MyActivity extends Activity:
-- No title bar.
API 21:
MyActivity extends Activity, parent="android:Theme.Material.Light"
-- Perfect green tinting of status bar and title bar.
MyActivity extends AppCompatActivity, parent="android:Theme.Material.Light"
-- Crashes with: You need to use a Theme.AppCompat theme (or descendant) with this activity.
MyActivity extends AppCompatActivity, parent="Theme.AppCompat.Light"
-- Status bar is correctly green tinted. Title bar has no background colour.
MyActivity extends AppCompatActivity, parent="Theme.AppCompat.Light.DarkActionBar"
-- Status bar is correctly green tinted. Title bar has black background colour.

How do I get the coloured title bar in Lollipop and an acceptable one pre-Lollipop? I know with extra work I can have a coloured pre-lollipop title bar, but that is not needed at this time.

Answer 1

You should be using the non-android namespaced properties with the support library:

<style name="AppTheme" parent="Theme.AppCompat.Light">
    <item name="colorPrimary">@color/primary</item>
    <item name="colorPrimaryDark">@color/primary_dark</item>
    <item name="colorAccent">@color/accent</item>
</style>

No v21 version required. This will give you consistent behavior back to API level 7