How to set background color of an Activity to white programmatically?

Add this single line in your activity, after setContentView() call

getWindow().getDecorView().setBackgroundColor(Color.WHITE);

?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<LinearLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
android:orientation="vertical"
android:layout_width="fill_parent"
android:layout_height="fill_parent"
android:background="#FFFFFF"
android:id="@+id/myScreen"
</LinearLayout>

In other words, "android:background" is the tag in the XML you want to change.

If you need to dynamically update the background value, see the following:

Exercise: Change background color, by SeekBar

Get a handle to the root layout used, then set the background color on that. The root layout is whatever you called setContentView with.

 setContentView(R.layout.main);

  // Now get a handle to any View contained 
  // within the main layout you are using
  View someView = findViewById(R.id.randomViewInMainLayout);

  // Find the root view
  View root = someView.getRootView();

  // Set the color
  root.setBackgroundColor(getResources().getColor(android.R.color.red));

I prefer coloring by theme

<style name="CustomTheme" parent="android:Theme.Light">
    <item name="android:windowBackground">@color/custom_theme_color</item>
    <item name="android:colorBackground">@color/custom_theme_color</item>
</style>