How to change the text and theme of Google’s Sign-In button on Android?

Shobhit Puri

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4 min read

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Mar 31, 2018

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Google’s SignInButton is missing android:text and many other attributes that are available to the Button class. In this post, I will show how to change the text on Google’s Sign-In button easily using the standard android:text.

I'll also show how you can switch between dark and light button themes. At the end of the post, a ready to use small Android library is included along with a sample application to try the same.

Requirements

• Android Studio or with Android SDK installed.
• minSdkVersion supported is 16.

Introduction

Do you want to provide localization for the Google Sign-In button? Maybe you want to change the default “Sign In” text to “Sign in with Google”. Or based on whether it is a sign-in or sign-up flow, you want to switch between “Sign in with Google” and “Sign up with Google” text. As you might already know, to set the text on an Android Button, you can use android:text="{string}" attribute in your layout XML. However if you want to do the same for Google Sign-In button, this attribute is not available.

On StackOverflow, there are obviously many questions which have been asked related to this issue. One of the most visited ones is the following. However most of its existing answers were hacks at the time of writing.

Follow along as I show you how you can use a very small library, created using Google’s recommended way to customize the SignInButton, that will enable you to use android:text attribute to set any text on the button. The library also enables you to change the theme of the button to light or dark easily.

Usage

1. Add the following to your app module level build.gradle file:

dependencies {
  implementation 'com.github.shobhitpuri:custom-google-signin-button:2.0.0'
}

2. Also, add the following in the top-level build.gradle file:

allprojects {
      repositories {
          google()
          maven { url "https://jitpack.io" }
          mavenCentral()
      }
}

3. In your XML Layout, have the following:

<RelativeLayout
    ...
    xmlns:app="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res-auto">

    <com.shobhitpuri.custombuttons.GoogleSignInButton
        android:layout_width="wrap_content"
        android:layout_height="wrap_content"
        android:layout_centerInParent="true"
        android:text="@string/google_sign_up"
        app:isDarkTheme="true" />
</RelativeLayout>

Library Options

If you notice the XML, there are two attributes:

• app:isDarkTheme="{Boolean}" : This is to enable you to switch between the light (grey-white) theme and the dark (blue) theme for the button. The library handles changing the text color, background color and color change on button press based on Google's recommended guidelines.
• android:text="{string}": This sets the text on the custom button.

Why a library?

“Why create a library? Aren’t there already tons of libraries?”, you would say.

I don't like using hacks and since you are here, this far in the article, I would assume you don't either.

The library was result of the issues I faced when trying to set text on the SignInButton. If the underlying implementation of Google's SignInButton changes, the hacks would break. The ideal Google recommended solution is to create a custom button as mentioned on Customizing the Sign-In Button. Google also specifies the branding guidelines which includes using custom icons and images for the button, setting specific text size, paddings and other do's and don'ts for the logo.

As you can see the ideal solution involves some extra work. Instead of creating a custom button just for my usage, I wanted to write some re-usable code, which I can drag and drop in any of my projects and it would work out of the box. That’s why I decided to create a small 3.93 KB library, so that anyone facing this issue need not spend time implementing a custom solution and can get the custom Google Sign-In button working in no time.

Source Code and Sample Android Application

You can find the implementation of the library and a sample Android application that is using the library here:

If you come across any issues or think of something that’s missing, you are more than welcome to create an issue or open a pull request.

Originally published at dev.to.