Question

I created an app and have been testing it against targetSdk 14. The spinner is hardly visible. I tried it out on my buddy’s phone, the same. Is that what the default spinner look like? It is not good. The same goes for edittext also.
Any opinions?

See that small triangle on the right side? That is the only thing indicating there is an object there.

This is a photo about how the button looks like on 4.0.

Answer 1

Yes, that is the default 4.0 spinner. I am accepting my own answer as I am providing a solution.
It is not disabled, just looks invisible. Though I set it enabled that made it better (for others: setEnabled command only exists in the java code, in xml it does not)). Then I adapted a custom spinner to make the text visible, as there is no textcolor for spinner.

I put the spinner items in the arrays.xml in the values folder:

<resources>
    <string-array name="duration">
        <item>Top 5 duration of outgoing calls</item>
        <item>Top 5 duration of incoming calls</item>
        <item>Top 5 duration of all calls</item>
    </string-array>
</resources>

Created a spinner.xml as the layout of the spinner text:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<TextView android:id="@+id/spinnerText" 
    android:layout_width="fill_parent"
    android:layout_height="wrap_content" 
    android:layout_centerHorizontal="true"
    android:textColor="#000000" 
    android:textSize="16dp" 
    xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"/>

Then I set these to the adapter:

ArrayAdapter<CharSequence> adapter_spinner = ArrayAdapter.createFromResource(ChartsDuration.this, R.array.duration, R.layout.spinner);
        adapter_spinner.setDropDownViewResource(android.R.layout.simple_spinner_dropdown_item);

As you see on the photo, the button text is white on 4.0 which is bad. Solution was easy to set text color to black, even though it is black default on sdk < 11.