Android Drawable Tinting is supported in Android 5.0+ (API 21+) only. (It does say "At the moment this is limited to coloring the action bar and some widgets.").
Theming
...
When you set these attributes, AppCompat automatically propagates
their values to the framework attributes on API 21+. This
automatically colors the status bar and Overview (Recents) task entry.
On older platforms, AppCompat emulates the color theming where
possible. At the moment this is limited to coloring the action bar and
some widgets.
And
Widget tinting
When running on devices with Android 5.0, all of the
widgets are tinted using the color theme attributes we just talked
about. There are two main features which allow this on Lollipop:
drawable tinting, and referencing theme attributes (of the form
?attr/foo) in drawables.
AppCompat provides similar behaviour on earlier versions of Android
for a subset of UI widgets:
Everything provided by AppCompat’s toolbar (action modes, etc)
EditText Spinner CheckBox RadioButton Switch (use the new
android.support.v7.widget.SwitchCompat) CheckedTextView You don’t need
to do anything special to make these work, just use these controls in
your layouts as usual and AppCompat will do the rest (with some
caveats; see the FAQ below).
Now AppCompatImageView,AppCompatButton will replace the ImageView,Button to support tint on devices with lower API. Check link for more details
AppCompatImageView,AppCompatButton
For tinting images you could use imageView.setColorFilter(int color). This works from API 8 and worked for tinting my black image to a color I wanted.
This can replace setImageTintList() but just using android:tint should also work.
You can achieve that using source code.
Previously tinting was not supported by DrawableCompat.
Starting from support library 22.1 you can do that, but you need do it in this way: