Android — How to set the background color for a notification in a foreground service

Recently i was struggling with setting the background color for a notification shown by a foreground service in Android.

Partially set background for my remote view notification

This is what my code looked like:

private fun createNotificationBuilder() {
    this.notificationBuilder = NotificationCompat.Builder(this, MyApplication.FOREGROUND_SERVICE_CHANNEL)
            .setContentTitle("MyForegroundService")
            .setOnlyAlertOnce(true)
            .setAutoCancel(false)
            .setSmallIcon(R.drawable.ic_notification)
            .setStyle(NotificationCompat.DecoratedCustomViewStyle())
            .setCustomContentView(notificationView)
            .setContentIntent(pendingIntent)
}

I thought that easy enough i would go to my custom remote notification view and change the background on the parent layout there:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<LinearLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
    android:layout_width="match_parent"
    android:background="@color/notification_background"
    android:layout_height="match_parent"
    android:baselineAligned="false">

That did change something but the background color was not applies to the whole notification. I seemed that there was a huge padding applied somewhere else. Then i tried playing around with the styles provided by the NotificationCompat class that provides also media specific styles.

private fun createNotificationBuilder() {
    this.notificationBuilder = NotificationCompat.Builder(this, MyApplication.FOREGROUND_SERVICE_CHANNEL)
            .setContentTitle("MyForegroundService")
            .setOnlyAlertOnce(true)
            .setAutoCancel(false)
            .setSmallIcon(R.drawable.ic_notification)
            .setColor(resources.getColor(R.color.colorPrimary))
            .setColorized(true)
            .setStyle(androidx.media.app.NotificationCompat.DecoratedMediaCustomViewStyle())
            .setCustomContentView(notificationView)
            .setContentIntent(pendingIntent)
}

Finally i figured out that in order to have the background set to the whole notification i have to chain the following method calls to the NotificationCompat.Builder:

• call setColor -> the color to be used on the background
• call setColorized -> the actual call to set the background color
• set style to NotificationCompat.DecoratedMediaCustomViewStyle()

Problem solved:

I hope this short tutorial was usefull to you and I will see you in my next post.

Happy coding :)