Change the color of a checked menu item in a navigation drawer

Well you can achieve this using Color State Resource. If you notice inside your NavigationView you’re using

app:itemIconTint="@color/black"
app:itemTextColor="@color/primary_text"

Here instead of using @color/black or @color/primary_test, use a Color State List Resource. For that, first create a new xml (e.g drawer_item.xml) inside color directory (which should be inside res directory.) If you don’t have a directory named color already, create one.

Now inside drawer_item.xml do something like this

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<selector xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android">
    <item android:color="checked state color" android:state_checked="true" />
    <item android:color="your default color" />
</selector>

Final step would be to change your NavigationView

<android.support.design.widget.NavigationView
    android:id="@+id/activity_main_navigationview"
    android:layout_width="wrap_content"
    android:layout_height="match_parent"
    android:layout_gravity="start"
    app:headerLayout="@layout/drawer_header"
    app:itemIconTint="@color/drawer_item"  // notice here
    app:itemTextColor="@color/drawer_item" // and here
    app:itemBackground="@android:color/transparent"// and here for setting the background color to tranparent
    app:menu="@menu/menu_drawer">

Like this you can use separate Color State List Resources for IconTint, ItemTextColor, ItemBackground.

Now when you set an item as checked (either in xml or programmatically), the particular item will have different color than the unchecked ones.