Bold characters in string.xml are not shown on screen

So after a day of search, I found the desired answer on Android Developers website! The Link to the page is here: https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/resources/string-resource.html

Sometimes you may want to create a styled text resource that is also used as a format string. Normally, this won't work because the String.format(String, Object...) method will strip all the style information from the string. The work-around to this is to write the HTML tags with escaped entities, which are then recovered with fromHtml(String), after the formatting takes place.

Basicaly, the change that I would make based on my original question is to replace the bracket "<" with the HTML tag for that, which is "&lt" + ";" (Type them together in your xml file! I had to separate them because StackOverflow will diplay the tag as the bracket itself.) For more detailed explanation, please see the Styling with HTML markup section from the website that I posted above.

i've had success using getText instead of getString. It seems to maintain styling.

from the docs:

You can use either getString(int) or getText(int) to retrieve a string. getText(int) retains any rich text styling applied to the string.

You need to format the text using Html.fromHtml or using a SpannableString.

Html.fromHtml example:

textView.setText(Html.fromHtml(getString(R.string.example_string, "good question")));

Edit:

If you're having trouble passing the tags through, its because it needs to be escaped by CDATA.

eg. <string name="example_string">This is a <![CDATA[<b>%1$s</b>]]></string>