Since I liked the design from BottomNavigationView I decided to create a new menu for my application, and not just use simple buttons.
I took this post as a guide.
According to the BottomNavigationView documentation , its purpose is
Provide quick navigation between top-level views of the application. It is primarily intended for use on mobile devices.
In my case, I just want each MenuItem trigger an action, but by default one MenuItem always selected:

I tried setting the color to white with:
app:itemIconTint="@color/white" app:itemTextColor="@color/white"
However, the markedly selected MenuItem is different from the others (the header size is larger), which still bothers me:

I came up with the idea of placing a hidden MenuItem to choose how:
<item android:id="@+id/uncheckedItem" android:title="" />
and make your look GONE
bottomNavigationView.getMenu().findItem(R.id.uncheckedItem).setChecked(true); bottomNavigationView.findViewById(R.id.uncheckedItem).setVisibility(View.GONE);
This makes all MenuItem elements uncontrollable, but by default BottomNavigationView hides the headers because it displays more than 3 MenuItem elements, even if the fourth MenuItem set to GONE :

So my question remains, is there a hack / hack to deselect all MenuItems and keep its names displayed?