I'm not sure why setting the textSize to zero didn't do the trick (it shrunk the text, but didn't make it go away), but setting the textColor to transparent works.
I'm very new to Android so correct me if I'm wrong, but I think if you decide to use navigation tabs on the Action Bar, they seemed to not be completely left aligned because the title text color is only transparent and hasn't gone away.
In your manifest.xml page you can give address to your activity label. the address is somewhere in your values/strings.xml . then you can change the value of the tag in xml file to null.
getSupportActionBar should be called after setSupportActionBar, thus setting the toolbar, otherwise, NullpointerException because there is no toolbar set.
Hope this helps
I remove the default appbar and run a custom toolbar instead using Theme.AppCompat.Light.NoActionBar then add a textview or something that extend to full toolbar width using attribute layout_width=match_parent and it pushes the title out of the toolbar. If you want to do this, you must study how to make a toolbar.