Can a custom view be used as a TabItem?

In certain cases, instead of the default tab view we may want to apply a custom XML layout for each tab. To achieve this, iterate over all the TabLayout.Tabs after attaching the sliding tabs to the pager:

public class MainActivity extends AppCompatActivity {

    @Override
    protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
        setContentView(R.layout.activity_main);

        // Get the ViewPager and set it's PagerAdapter so that it can display items
        ViewPager viewPager = (ViewPager) findViewById(R.id.viewpager);
        SampleFragmentPagerAdapter pagerAdapter = 
            new SampleFragmentPagerAdapter(getSupportFragmentManager(), MainActivity.this);
        viewPager.setAdapter(pagerAdapter);

        // Give the TabLayout the ViewPager
        TabLayout tabLayout = (TabLayout) findViewById(R.id.sliding_tabs);
        tabLayout.setupWithViewPager(viewPager);

        // Iterate over all tabs and set the custom view
        for (int i = 0; i < tabLayout.getTabCount(); i++) {
            TabLayout.Tab tab = tabLayout.getTabAt(i);
            tab.setCustomView(pagerAdapter.getTabView(i));
        }
    }

    //...
} 

Next, we add the getTabView(position) method to the SampleFragmentPagerAdapter class:

public class SampleFragmentPagerAdapter extends FragmentPagerAdapter {
   private String tabTitles[] = new String[] { "Tab1", "Tab2" };
   private int[] imageResId = { R.drawable.ic_one, R.drawable.ic_two };

    public View getTabView(int position) {
        // Given you have a custom layout in `res/layout/custom_tab.xml` with a TextView and ImageView
        View v = LayoutInflater.from(context).inflate(R.layout.custom_tab, null);
        TextView tv = (TextView) v.findViewById(R.id.textView);
        tv.setText(tabTitles[position]);
        ImageView img = (ImageView) v.findViewById(R.id.imgView);
        img.setImageResource(imageResId[position]);
        return v;
    }

} 

With this you can setup any custom tab content for each page in the adapter.

SOURCE