 <p>It's a little complicated at the mentioned blog, I've used a similar but simplier way. You do need 3 star images (red_star_full.png, red_star_half.png and red_star_empty.png) and one xml, that's all.</p> <p>Put these 3 images at res/drawable.</p> <p>Put there the following ratingbar_red.xml:</p> <pre><code>&lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?&gt; &lt;layer-list xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"&gt; &lt;item android:id="@android:id/background" android:drawable="@drawable/red_star_empty" /&gt; &lt;item android:id="@android:id/secondaryProgress" android:drawable="@drawable/red_star_half" /&gt; &lt;item android:id="@android:id/progress" android:drawable="@drawable/red_star_full" /&gt; &lt;/layer-list&gt; </code></pre> <p>and, finally, tell your ratingbar definition to use this, i.e.</p> <pre><code>&lt;RatingBar android:progressDrawable="@drawable/ratingbar_red"/&gt; </code></pre> <p>That's it.</p>