 <p>Assuming the deprecated library works as it always has, as it should, this is the procedure I have used to colour my tabs. I just set the background in code as follows, as it wasn't direcly accessible in xml:</p> <pre><code> TabWidget tabs = (TabWidget)getTabWidget(); for (int i = 0; i&lt;tabs.getChildCount(); i++) { RelativeLayout tab = (RelativeLayout) tabs.getChildAt(i); tab.setBackgroundDrawable(this.getResources().getDrawable(R.drawable.tabindicator)); </code></pre> <p>The tabindicator drawable is as follows:</p> <pre><code>&lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?&gt; &lt;selector xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"&gt; &lt;!-- Non focused states --&gt; &lt;item android:state_focused="false" android:state_selected="false" android:state_pressed="false" android:drawable="@drawable/tab_unselected" /&gt; &lt;item android:state_focused="false" android:state_selected="true" android:state_pressed="false" android:drawable="@drawable/tab_selected" /&gt; &lt;!-- Focused states --&gt; &lt;item android:state_focused="true" android:state_selected="false" android:state_pressed="false" android:drawable="@drawable/tab_focus" /&gt; &lt;item android:state_focused="true" android:state_selected="true" android:state_pressed="false" android:drawable="@drawable/tab_focus" /&gt; &lt;!-- Pressed --&gt; &lt;item android:state_selected="true" android:state_pressed="true" android:drawable="@drawable/tab_press" /&gt; &lt;item android:state_pressed="true" android:drawable="@drawable/tab_press" /&gt; &lt;/selector&gt; </code></pre> <p>The drawables were just 9-patch images with the colour, although you may be able to get a similar effect using a standard colour.</p>