I will add my answer since I don't use any of the other answers provided.

With the Support Library v7, all the styles are actually already defined and ready to use, for the standard buttons, all of these styles are available:

style="@style/Widget.AppCompat.Button"style="@style/Widget.AppCompat.Button.Colored"style="@style/Widget.AppCompat.Button.Borderless"style="@style/Widget.AppCompat.Button.Borderless.Colored"

Widget.AppCompat.Button:

Widget.AppCompat.Button.Colored:

Widget.AppCompat.Button.Borderless

Widget.AppCompat.Button.Borderless.Colored:

To answer the question, the style to use is therefore

<Button style="@style/Widget.AppCompat.Button.Colored".....................android:text="Button"/>

How to change the color

For the whole app:

The color of all the UI controls (not only buttons, but also floating action buttons, checkboxes etc.) is managed by the attribute colorAccent as explained here. You can modify this style and apply your own color in your theme definition:

<style name="AppTheme" parent="Theme.AppCompat.Light.NoActionBar">    ...    <item name="colorAccent">@color/Orange</item></style>

For a specific button:

If you need to change the style of a specific button, you can define a new style, inheriting one of the parent styles described above. In the example below I just changed the background and font colors:

<style name="AppTheme.Button" parent="Widget.AppCompat.Button.Colored">    <item name="colorButtonNormal">@color/Red</item>    <item name="android:textColor">@color/White</item></style>

Then you just need to apply this new style on the button with:

android:theme="@style/AppTheme.Button"

To set a default button design in a layout, add this line to the styles.xml theme:

<item name="buttonStyle">@style/btn</item>

where @style/btn is your button theme. This sets the button style for all the buttons in a layout with a specific theme

Simplest Solution

Step 1: Use the latest support library

compile 'com.android.support:appcompat-v7:25.2.0'

Step 2: Use AppCompatActivity as your parent Activity class

public class MainActivity extends AppCompatActivity

Step 3: Use app namespace in your layout XML file

<RelativeLayout    xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"    xmlns:app="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res-auto"    android:layout_width="match_parent"    android:layout_height="match_parent">

Step 4: Use AppCompatButton instead of Button

<android.support.v7.widget.AppCompatButton    android:id="@+id/buttonAwesome"    android:layout_width="wrap_content"    android:layout_height="wrap_content"    android:text="Awesome Button"    android:textColor="@color/whatever_text_color_you_want"    app:backgroundTint="@color/whatever_background_color_you_want"/>

If I understand you correctly, you want to do something like this:

In such case, it should be just enough to use:

<item name="android:colorButtonNormal">#2196f3</item>

Or for API less than 21:

<item name="colorButtonNormal">#2196f3</item>

In addition to Using Material Theme Tutorial.

Animated variant is here.