Android notification icons with color

Question

According to the android iconography documentation here and also here the icons in the status bar are supposed to be entirely white with transparent background. However, even the built in icons don't all follow this pattern it seems. The signal quality (for wifi and cell), battery indicator, and some others have the holo blue background on some icons on newer devices. Is this color built into the icon itself? I am looking to implement a status bar icon with my app that will indicate the status of a connection to an external (bluetooth) device. I was planning on doing my company logo (which is a fairly simple, mostly circular shape) filled in with a color to indicate the status of the connection (connected - green, not connected - red). But since I'm not supposed to use a color these seems much more complicated. Is it really that bad to use a non white icon, and if it's so bad why does google do it?

Answer 1

It's convention, like creating accessors for your private fields, but it's not strict that you follow it. That being said, it is a good idea to follow the color scheme of the OS, simply because that way everything looks uniform. Therefore, I would suggest that rather than green and red, you choose holo blue and grey. It is completely your choice as the developer.