Styling the popup menu in Android 5.0

Question

I'm making my app ready for Android 5.0, I'm using the latest compatibility library, here is what my style looks like.

<resources>
    <style name="AppTheme" parent="Theme.AppCompat.Light.DarkActionBar">
        <item name="colorPrimary">@color/theme_accent</item>
        <item name="colorAccent">@color/theme_accent_secondary</item>
    </style>

    <style name="AppThemeDark" parent="Theme.AppCompat">
        <item name="colorPrimary">@color/theme_accent</item>
        <item name="colorAccent">@color/theme_accent_secondary</item>
    </style>
</resources>

(The ActionBar color is being set programmatically.)

Now, I want the overflow/popup menu to have the dark background like it had in the holo implementation, but I can't get it to work, here is what it looks like:

I have tried setting the popupMenuStyle but it didn't work.

How can I make the popup menu darker?

Answer 1

Not a full answer but what I found so far:

In past versions you needed to specify a drawable (Check https://github.com/StylingAndroid/StylingActionBar code and tutorials)

Apparently, now that is a color. To modify it you need to do specify the following theme:

<resources xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android">

    <style name="AppTheme" parent="android:Theme.Material.Light.DarkActionBar">
        <item name="android:actionBarPopupTheme">@style/popupNew</item>
    </style>

    <style name="popupNew" parent="android:ThemeOverlay.Material.Light">
        <item name="android:colorBackground">@color/red</item>
    </style>

</resources>

This works correctly if the theme applied to the app is just this. If I add android:actionBarPopupTheme to my existing theme, it doesn't work. I am trying to figure out why.