Question

I have a ListView and I am using Theme.Light for my activity, but when the user taps a list item my list selector gets stuck until the user taps somewhere else. This does not happen when I use the default theme!

First I had this problem: ListSelector applies to the entire list and now I’ve hit another. Google, what is going on over there?!

Answer 1

This is a pretty annoying issue that for some reason might be related to what theme you are using. I’m not sure exactly what the root cause is, but here is a workaround (present in the Android platform itself) that has worked for me.

<!-- Even though these two point to the same resource, have two states so the drawable will invalidate itself when coming out of pressed state. -->
    <item android:state_focused="true" android:state_pressed="true"
        android:drawable="@drawable/list_selector_background_transition" />
    <item android:state_focused="false" android:state_pressed="true"
        android:drawable="@drawable/list_selector_background_transition" />

(taken from list_selector_background.xml)

Notice that the Android platform developers seemed to have also run into this problem, and they have a workaround that re-uses the same background resource for different selector states. Apparently that triggers an re-validate call that fixes the problem (at least for me).