Okay I think I found a solution for you. It is called Overflow Menu and you need to call the below method in your onCreate method.
private void getOverflowMenu() {
try {
ViewConfiguration config = ViewConfiguration.get(this);
Field menuKeyField = ViewConfiguration.class.getDeclaredField("sHasPermanentMenuKey");
if(menuKeyField != null) {
menuKeyField.setAccessible(true);
menuKeyField.setBoolean(config, false);
}
} catch (Exception e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
Try this and let me know if it works for you.
EDIT:
I think I understood your problem finally. I can give you one idea. If you do not want to use overflow menu and just display menu items as displayed in the screen-shot you have posted, you can create a layout on top of your activity.
You can take a linear layout, give a background that looks the same as action bar and place whatever icons you want to put there, and give functionality to them with onClickListener. Hope this will give you some idea. This way you can create your own custom menu. Try the layout below and replace ic_launcher drawable with menu icons. Then just set onClickListeners to them and perform whatever functions you want to perform inside onClick method.
<RelativeLayout
android:layout_width="fill_parent"
android:layout_height="wrap_content"
android:orientation="horizontal"
android:background="#66000000" >
<ImageView
android:id="@+id/xMenuBtn1"
android:layout_width="wrap_content"
android:layout_height="wrap_content"
android:layout_alignParentLeft="true"
android:background="@drawable/ic_launcher" />
<TextView
android:id="@+id/xMenuTxt"
android:layout_width="wrap_content"
android:layout_height="wrap_content"
android:text="Chats"
android:textSize="18sp"
android:layout_toRightOf="@+id/xMenuBtn1"
android:layout_centerVertical="true" />
<ImageView
android:id="@+id/xMenuBtn2"
android:layout_width="wrap_content"
android:layout_height="wrap_content"
android:layout_toLeftOf="@+id/xMenuBtn3"
android:background="@drawable/ic_launcher" />
<ImageView
android:id="@+id/xMenuBtn3"
android:layout_width="wrap_content"
android:layout_height="wrap_content"
android:layout_alignParentRight="true"
android:background="@drawable/ic_launcher" />
</RelativeLayout>
