Load screen android studio

Implementing the Perfect Splash Screen in Android

Splash Screen is the first screen visible to the user when the application’s launched. It’s a vital screen that will allow the users to have first impressions of the application.

A Splash Screen is a screen that appears when you open an app on your mobile device. Sometimes it’s referred to as a launch screen or startup screen and shows up when your app is loading after you’ve just opened it.

When the loading is finished, you’ll be taken to a more functional screen where you can complete actions.

Splash screens appear on your screen for a fleeting moment — look away and you might miss them. The splash screen is one of the most vital screens in the application since it’s the user’s first experience with the application.

There are 2 common methods of implementing splash screens and will find the right way:

1. Using Timers (the bad)
2. Using a Launcher Theme (The Right way)

Using timer (Our 1st Method) into your activity to display splash, we create a splash activity and create a thread in onCreate() for shows up for 2/3 seconds, then go to our desired activity. Here, see the implementation of this easy method:

The above approach isn’t the correct approach. It’ll give rise to cold starts.

The purpose of a Splash Screen is to quickly display a beautiful screen while the application fetches the relevant content if any (from network calls/database). With the above approach, there’s an additional overhead that the SplashActivity uses to create its layout.

It’ll give rise to slow starts to the application which is bad for the user experience (wherein a blank black/white screen appears).

The cold start appears since the application takes time to load the layout file of the Splash Activity. So instead of creating the layout, we’ll use the power of the application theme to create our initial layout (Our 2nd Method).

Application theme is instantiated before the layout is created. We’ll set a drawable inside the theme that’ll comprise the Activity’s background and an icon using layer-list as shown below.

Do you know when an activity is called Android OS first see in the manifest is there any theme for that activity and load the theme from manifest?

So, we will set a custom theme in Manifest for our splash activity. To create the theme for the splash screen, follow the below process.

Step 1

Create Background for Splash Screen in drawable/splash_background.xml, the bitmap is the image we want to show.

Step 2

Create the gradient onto which your app logo will be placed in drawable/bg_gradient.xml, background can be a gradient or any colour depending on your app.

Step 3

Create Style for Splash Screen in res/values/themes.xml

Step 4

Create an empty Activity named SplashScreenActivity and set the style as the theme for it in AndroidManifest.xml

Step 5

Setting the Intent to your MainActivity.java from SplashScreenActivity.java

As we are loading the splash screen them from manifest, there is no need to setContentView() with any xml layout. If you want to show your splash screen for some amount of time (like five secs) you can create a Handler , also using a timer can help you fetch data from the cloud on your MainActivity which could be a better approach than to show a dialog on home screen.

Using the theme and removing the layout from the SplashScreenActivity is the correct way to create a splash screen 🙌.

Now that our splash is working, what size of the image should I put into a drawable folder?

Always put your app_logo.png into drawable-xxhdpi folder so that your logo automatically scales for all types of phone screens in most cases.

Also, make sure that image resolution is not more than 1000×1000 pixels . It can have less resolution depending on how you want it. Now there are diverse types of splash screen which has multiple logos on various parts of the screen. How that could be done?

From the above example, we implemented our method to create a splash like Twitter, and now to create one like Facebook we just make a slight change to our drawable/splash_background.xml.

Just add as many item to your layer-list you want to place in your splash screen.

Splash screen best practices

Splash screens are simple. They’re used to enhance a brand and give users something nice to look at as they wait. In this regard, here are some best practices for when you design your own splash screen:

• Keep it free from unnecessary distraction
• Don’t use multiple colours or logos
• Use animation sparingly

Hope it helped. Happy Coding 😀

BTW, I solve real-world problems by building useful apps. Have a look at my portfolio .

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Meet the Jetpack Splashscreen API: a definitive guide for splash screens in Android

Splash screens, also called launch screens, are the screens shown by the app as it loads, during the app’s startup. They exist to provide a momentary brand exposure or improve the user experience by showing a preview of the app as it starts, which can reduce the user’s perceived load time.

Branded and preview splash screens as in Material Design docs

On many projects I’ve worked on, in addition to showing the splash screen, we had to animate the transition between splash and first app screen. Depending on the animation type and how we’re showing the first app views, we can have jank or a perceivable delay between the animations. So, we have to choose the right approach accordingly to the use case.

In this article you’ll see how animated splash screens are created in Android and how this should be done now that we have Jetpack’s Core SplashScreen, which backports Android 12 SplashScreen API back to Android Marshmallow (API 23).

Suppose we have to implement the following branded splash screen for an Android app:

Note that we start with a brand image, fade it out and then begin a slide down transition in the start screen. This use case will let us exercise multiple techniques in splash screen display, despite having simple transitions in the design. The animations must run sequentially and a long delay or jank between them is not acceptable.

Simple things first

Let’s start simple: showing what happens in Android when you don’t set up a splash screen. After creating an ‘Empty Activity Project’ in Android Studio, the main activity layout was adjusted to have the same design as the start screen reference. Nothing was made regarding the splash screen.
This is how it’s displayed up to API level 30:

As we didn’t add nothing to set up a splash screen yet, a black screen is shown while the main activity is loading.

Important: On an Android 12, a static branded splash screen was automatically displayed, using a centered app icon without any effort at all. Nice improvement!

Automatic static splash screen on Android 12

To repeat this step, clone the following branch in Github’s repo: github.com/tgloureiro/animated_splashscreen_android/tree/step1_no_splash

Showing a splash screen (Old way)

The traditional way of defining a splash screen in Android, is setting a window background to the the activity being launched. As the content is not attached to it yet, the window background is fully visible while the activity is loading. After it loads, content view is set inside the onCreate() method and it’s views starts being rendered.

Therefore, to show the splash screen we have to set up the window background in the theme being used by the activity:

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If we need the splash screen to have a logo centered over some background drawable, we can use a LayerDrawable , that allows us to specify a list of drawables that is drawn in the order they’re declared. In this example, we have a flat colored background with the logo centered in the screen. The use of android:gravity informs the platform to center the second drawable in the middle of the screen.

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For the splash background, we can use any type of drawable. For this example, we’ll use a solid color. The color can be specified directly in the layer list, instead of pointing to another Drawable as we did here

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This is the old way of doing a splash screen and it’s recommended up to API Level 22, the ones not covered by the new Core Splash Screen API.

Fading out the logo

There’s an easy way of implementing the splash screen’s fade out after activity loading: we can have the illusion of a logo fade out making a cross-fade between the splash screen and the screen background without the logo. We can do it using a TransitionDrawable . A transition drawable allows us to define two drawable layers and easily cross-fade between them using the startTransition(int) method.

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We have to perform the following tasks:

1. Check if the splash screen was not displayed, otherwise we just set content view
2. Get a reference to the window background and start the crossfade transition
3. Launch a coroutine and after waiting for the animation duration, set the content view

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Check how it is rendered in a phone:

To repeat this step, clone the following branch in Github’s repo: github.com/tgloureiro/animated_splashscreen_android/tree/step2_fade_out_splash

Showing the splash screen using Core SplashScreen API

The Core Splash Screen API provides a way of defining the elements we have in the Splash Screen. To setup a splash screen, you have to do the following steps:

1- Setup a style with Theme.SplashScreen as a parent, in themes.xml

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2- Setup windowSplashScreenBackground, windowSplashScreenAnimatedIcon as the background and the centered logo in the screen

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3- Setup the theme to be displayed in activity after the splash screen

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4- In build.gradle, change your compileSdkVersion to «android-S» (to be changed to apiLevel 31 with the release of Android 12) and include the library in dependencies.

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5- Finally, in the MainActivity (or the entry point for your app) you just have to call installSplashScreen() before setContentView()

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Very straightforward, huh? With these simple steps you’ll be showing your splash screen from API23 to Android12.

Core SplashScreen API + Animations

In Android 12, the logo itself can be animated using AnimationDrawable or AnimatedVector . The AnimationDrawable works similar to a classical animation which you have to represent
frame by frame and duration for each one. AnimatedVectorDrawable let’s you describe your animation that will be interpolated by the framework.

The backported version of the Core Splash Screen API doesn’t support animations on the logo yet. But we can implement a fadeout animation after splash’s exhibition and I’ll show how to implement it using this API.

We have to perform the following tasks:

1. Check if the splash screen was not displayed, otherwise we manually set the theme and the content view
2. Install the splash screen and listen for the ExitAnimation event
3. Get a reference to the the logo, fade it out, remove the splash and set content view after it finishes

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Check how it is rendered in a phone:

To repeat this step, clone the following branch in Github’s repo: github.com/tgloureiro/animated_splashscreen_android/tree/step3_core_splash_api_fade_out

Showing the splash screen using Core SplashScreen API with Jetpack Compose

The splash steps are pretty much the same, except we use Compose’s setContent<> instead of setContentView(int) . That’s it.

The challenge here is to replace the start screen animation, originally made using MotionLayout, with one made using Compose. We can use an initially invisible AnimatedVisibility Composable and make it visible in the first pass using a LaunchedEffect. Making it visible will start the animation as described in the widget.

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Check how it is rendered in a phone:

To repeat this step, clone the following branch in Github’s repo: github.com/tgloureiro/animated_splashscreen_android/tree/step4_core_splash_jetpack

Final thoughts

The new Jetpack Core Splashscreen API provides a default way to create splash screens back to API23, with useful mechanisms we can use to know whether the loading ended and a way to continue showing the splash if we want to do additional work after starting the activity. The results are similar to what we had before, with the benefit of reduced boilerplate and compatibility with new Android versions.

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New Splash Screen In Android

A better way to display Android Splash Screen. #Android12

🚣 Hi, In this article we learn to implement splash screen in android. From OLD traditional way to NEW modern way.

Introduction

Android Splash Screen usually the first screen that is displayed to the user when an app is not fully ready to display content.

How the splash screen works

When a user launches an app while the app’s process is not running (a cold start) or the Activity has not been created (a warm start), the following events occur. (The splash screen is never shown during a hot start.)

1. The system shows the splash screen using themes and any animations that you’ve defined.

2. When the app is ready, the splash screen is dismissed and the app is displayed.

Now let’s dive in,

Initializing Splash Activity

First, To launch the activity as splash screen we just need to add the action main and category launcher to your activity in AndroidManifest.xml

Traditional Approach

The old way,

We used to pause the user interaction for like 2–3 sec for a splash screen to load.

UI Holding was never an option. As in Activity we used to write these horrific code… and activity used to look like shi**.

This used to work well back then & now too, but we all knew there should be something more than just waiting.

Modern Approach

With a new approach, we don’t declare a time to wait.

Step 1

First, Gather all necessary elements for splash screen like colors & logo.

Then, Create drawable placing logo as bitmap/drawable.

Step 2

In style declare a any desired theme for splash screen and set android:windowBackground attribute value to drawable we created.

The android:windowBackground attribute will show our created drawable on activity transition.

And, In AndroidManifest.xml we add our theme as.

Final Step

To hide content of splash screen layout, in activity remove setContentView(),

As to show created drawable as a transition between these splash & another activity we won’t be needing splash layout.

Here’s the source code… if you need.

Done. The modern approach is more convincing than our traditional approach.

Continue to read more on Android 12 Splash Screen

— Recently,

Android 12 adds the SplashScreen API, which enables a new app launch animation for all apps. This includes an into-app motion at launch, a splash screen showing your app icon, and a transition to your app itself.

The new experience brings standard design elements to every app launch, but it’s also customizable so your app can maintain its unique branding.

This is similar to our modern approach.

Read more at the official website.

Let’s test Splash by Upgrading to — Android 12,

After upgrading, From NoWhere, Boom A error popups and your application installation failed.

Installation did not succeed.
The application could not be installed: INSTALL_FAILED_VERIFICATION_FAILURE
List of apks:
[0] ‘…/build/outputs/apk/debug/app-debug.apk’
Installation failed due to: ‘null’

INSTALL_PARSE_FAILED_MANIFEST_MALFORMED: Failed parse during installPackageLI:

Targeting S+ (version 10000 and above) requires that an explicit value for android:exported be defined when intent filters are present”

To Fix Installation failed ?👼

Now For Splash Screen,

For testing the effects & changes let’s observe with WHITE & BLACK color background first.

Create new styles.xml or theme.xml (v31).

As mentioned, It’s similar to our modern approach.

The only Difference is , we need to remove android:windowBackground for Android 12.

By default your launcher icon will act as a splash screen view.

No need to create drawable. Just add your launcher icon & Kaboom it’s a splash screen logo.

As documented, SplashScreen uses the windowBackground of your theme if it’s a single color and the launcher icon. The customization of the splash screen is done by adding attributes to the app theme.

But it can be customized in many ways. Amazing and simple right?

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