Remove the SearchIcon as hint in the searchView

Question

I am doing an application where for example when i click on the image(it is a searchView)

Answer 1

TL;DR: Simply setting the EditText's hint to the empty string is enough to remove the hint icon.

I found an answer that actually works. There's a lot of stuff on changing the icon using reflection - such as discussed at Styling the ActionBar SearchView. This website IS a great resource, but unfortunately the search hint ImageView does not change (even though the reflection does not cause errors). The only way that I was able to remove this image was this:

try {
    int searchPlateId = searchView.getContext().getResources().getIdentifier("android:id/search_src_text", null, null);
    EditText searchPlate = (EditText) searchView.findViewById(searchPlateId);
    searchPlate.setHint("");
}
catch (Throwable t)
{
    t.printStackTrace();
}

You should place this in your onCreateOptionsMenu method, and get a reference to your XML-declared SearchView using something like:

SearchView searchView = (SearchView) menu.findItem(R.id.action_search).getActionView();