Tablayout with icons only

One approach is setting the icons after TabLayout.setupWithViewPager() method.

mTabLayout.setupWithViewPager(mViewPager);for (int i = 0; i < mTabLayout.getTabCount(); i++) {  mTabLayout.getTabAt(i).setIcon(R.drawable.your_icon);}

The tutorial shown in the following link should cover what you want. https://github.com/codepath/android_guides/wiki/Google-Play-Style-Tabs-using-TabLayout#add-icons-to-tablayout

I copied the relevant section below.

Add Icons to TabLayout

Currently, the TabLayout class does not provide a clean abstraction model that allows for icons in your tab. There are many posted workarounds, one of which is to return a SpannableString, containing your icon in an ImageSpan, from your PagerAdapter's getPageTitle(position) method as shown in the code snippet below:

private int[] imageResId = {        R.drawable.ic_one,        R.drawable.ic_two,        R.drawable.ic_three};// ...@Overridepublic CharSequence getPageTitle(int position) {    // Generate title based on item position    // return tabTitles[position];    Drawable image = context.getResources().getDrawable(imageResId[position]);    image.setBounds(0, 0, image.getIntrinsicWidth(), image.getIntrinsicHeight());    SpannableString sb = new SpannableString(" ");    ImageSpan imageSpan = new ImageSpan(image, ImageSpan.ALIGN_BOTTOM);    sb.setSpan(imageSpan, 0, 1, Spannable.SPAN_EXCLUSIVE_EXCLUSIVE);    return sb;}

By default, the tab created by TabLayout sets the textAllCaps property to be true, which prevents ImageSpans from being rendered. You can override this behavior by changing the tabTextAppearance property.

  <style name="MyCustomTabLayout" parent="Widget.Design.TabLayout">        <item name="tabTextAppearance">@style/MyCustomTextAppearance</item>  </style>  <style name="MyCustomTextAppearance" parent="TextAppearance.Design.Tab">        <item name="textAllCaps">false</item>  </style>

In new version of TabLayout, google added TabItem which easily can add Icon through your XML with following code:

<android.support.design.widget.TabLayout         app:tabTextColor="@color/gray"         app:tabMode="fixed"         app:tabBackground="@color/red"         app:tabIndicatorHeight="4dp"         app:tabIndicatorColor="@color/purple"         app:tabPadding="2dp"         app:tabSelectedTextColor="@color/white"         app:tabMinWidth="64dp"         android:layout_height="wrap_content"         android:layout_width="match_parent">     <!--add height and width to TabItem -->     <android.support.design.widget.TabItem              android:text="@string/tab_text"/>     <android.support.design.widget.TabItem             android:icon="@drawable/ic_android"/> </android.support.design.widget.TabLayout>

See more here.