Most users prefer to see apps using the latest themes provided by Android. To be competitive with the many other apps in the market, you'll probably want to upgrade your app as well, but what about your users who are still running older versions of Android? By setting up our resources properly, we can use resource selection in Android to automatically define the parent theme based on the Android OS version the user is running.
First, let's explore the three main themes available in Android:
- Theme - Gingerbread and earlier
- Theme.Holo - Honeycomb (API 11)
- Theme.Material - Lollipop (API 21)
This recipe will show how to properly set up the resource directories for Android to use the most appropriate theme based on the API version the app is running on.