Placing my ActionBar at the bottom

Question

I followed a tutorial on getting actionbars in my app. But even when I put android:uiOptions=\"splitActionBarWhenNarrow\" in my Manifest file it still keeps it

Answer 1

The google default action bar does not in any case appear on the bottom. As it seems others have mentioned, splitActionBarWhenNarrow only puts a subset of your ActionBar (like tabs, etc) on the bottom of the screen when the device is narrow. Unfortunately, if you want to implement an ActionBar like interface on the bottom of the screen, you'll have to implement it yourself (a quick search finds this example), as I haven't seen any Libraries to do this for you.

In all, though, I would recommend against it, as it violates the Seamlessness design principle in the design documents by breaking user expectations of where ActionBar type controls will be - An android user is ideally used to doing things a certain way, and you would need a pretty compelling reason to break that expectation.