some things have changed since I asked this question so I will answer it myself. With Support Library 23.4.0 the support for VectorDrawables from Ressources was reenabled: Android Support Library 23.4.0 available now You can find more information on that in this cast from the Google I/O 2016: What‘s new in the support library - Google I/O 2016 You need to add this to every Activity where you want to use VectorDrawables on devices below Android 5: static { AppCompatDelegate.setCompatVectorFromResourcesEnabled(true); } So you can now use VectorDrawables in DrawableContainers but it can still cause some issues as mentioned in the sources above so use it with caution. I did not reenable this feature in my app so far but I will change a lot of my icons to VectorDrawables with my next major release and will then dive deeper into this topic.
