Android app icons set

How to Update the Launcher Icon for Your Android App

You can add value to any product by giving the user interface a professional look and feel. When users like what they see in an app UI, they’re much more likely to install it. There are a set of defined rules for the design, colour, icon and other UI elements that your Android app should follow. In this article, we will stick to the icons, specifically the launcher icon, for your Android app.

The icons for an Android app are segregated into several categories. These include:

• Launcher Icon: this icon represents your app on the user’s device’s home screen or application list. This can either be an Adaptive Launcher Icon, for Android 8.0 (API level 26) or above, or a Legacy Launcher Icon, for Android 7.1 (API level 25) or below.
• Action Bar Icons: for the items in the action bar.
• Tab Icons: for the tab items that have icons, if any.

You can learn more about these icon categories by looking at other apps. Here is an example of the WhatsApp icons:

Now, creating these icons may seem easy if you are a designer, or if you are a developer who has a designer on your team. But it is not as easy as it seems. You will have to create icons for each different dimension, based on the Android device screen resolutions and density. To give you a sense of how much work this can be, here is the list of sizes for which you need to create the launcher icon if you are going to do it in the traditional way:

Density	Icon
ldpi	36 x 36 px
mdpi	48 x 48 px
tvdpi	64 x 64 px
hdpi	72 x 72 px
xhdpi	96 x 96 px
xxhdpi	144 x 144 px
xxxhdpi	192 x 192 px
Web	512 x 512 px

And this is just the launcher icon. There is a similar list for each category of icon. But thankfully, Android Studio provides us with a tool called Image Asset Studio that handles the creation of icons for all screen densities very easily.

What Is Image Asset Studio?

Android Studio 3 has introduced Image Asset Studio for creating icons for your app. It takes care of generating app icons of appropriate resolution for different screen densities and placing them in the respective mipmap-density folders in the resource directory. It also generates the icon for the web (512 x 512 px) which is required for uploading the application to the Google Play Store. These icons are then fetched accordingly from the folders based on the screen density of the devices during runtime.

For adaptive launcher icons, Image Asset Studio provides a complete preview of the icon set which includes circle, square, rounded square, squircle, full bleed layer, legacy icon, round and Google Play Store versions of the icon as well.

For legacy launcher icons, on the other hand, the devices do not support icons of varying shapes. So a more restricted set of icons will be generated.

Using Image Asset Studio

Let’s take a look at how to create an icon set using Image Asset Studio.

How to Update an Icon Using Image Asset Studio

To start Image Asset Studio, select Android in the Project Window. Right click on the res folder and select New > Image Asset. You have now opened Image Asset Studio. You can now create an Adaptive Launcher Icon or Legacy Only Launcher Icon as per your requirement.

Create an Adaptive Launcher Icon

You’ll use this icon type for Android 8.0 support.

First, select Launcher Icons (Adaptive & Legacy) for Icon Type. Change the name of the icon if you wish to. If the name already exists, there will be a warning at the bottom of the dialog, telling you the existing one will be overwritten.

In the Foreground Layer tab, select the Asset Type:

• Image: Set the path of the custom icon image.
• Clip Art: Select the icon from the set of material design icons and set the colour.
• Text: Set a specified string, and set the font and the colour.

Similarly, in the Background Layer tab, you can select an Image, Clip Art, or Text asset type.

For both the foreground and background layers, you also have the following optional settings:

• Layer Name: You can give the layer a unique name.
• Scaling Parameters: These can be set to your requirements. This option is disabled if you select a colour for the background layer.
• Trim: Choose if you want to remove the transparent spaces around your icon.
• Resize: Change the size of the icon.

The Legacy tab lets you decide whether to also generate a legacy icon. Here you can choose whether you want to generate a legacy icon, a Google Play Store icon, and a round icon, as well as what shape to use for each of them.

Create a Legacy Launcher Icon

This is the kind of icon you’ll create if you want to support versions of Android less than or equal to 7.1.

First, select Launcher Icons (Legacy Only) for the Icon Type. You can change the Name of the icon at this time if you wish to. If the name already exists, there will be a warning at the bottom that the existing one will be overwritten. Select the Asset Type and configure the associated settings.

• Image: Set the path of the custom icon image.
• Clip Art: Select the icon from the set of material design icons and set the colour.
• Text: Set a specified string, and set the font and the colour.

You can also configure some optional settings for the icon’s appearance:

• Trim: Choose this if you want to remove the transparent spaces around your icon.
• Padding: Set the padding for the icon.
• Foreground: Set the foreground colour.
• Background: Set the background colour.
• Scaling: Choose to crop or shrink to fit.
• Shape: To add a backdrop to the icon, select the shape. For a transparent backdrop, select none.
• Effect: Choose whether to have a dog-eared effect for your square or rectangular shaped icon.

Any changes you make will be reflected in the preview section . Once you’re happy with your icon’s look and feel, click Next.

You will then be taken to the settings screen, where you can change the Resource Directory where your icons will be emitted. Update it if you want. Following are the available options:

• main/res: for all build variants, including release and debug.
• release/res: overrides the main source set for the single release version of the build.
• debug/res: for debugging only.
• custom source set: you can define your own source set.

Finally, wrap it up by pressing Finish.

Now we are ready with our new launcher icon in all the respective folders. The name of my launcher icon is ic_launcher_demo . You can see all the icons that were generated for this icon in the screenshot below.

Update the AndroidManifest File

Now it’s time to update the AndroidManifest file so that our app knows to use the new icon. To start, open your AndroidManifest.xml file. Here, the default launcher icon is set on line 7 and 9. You need to update it with the new icon that you created.

Change android:icon and android:roundIcon to the name you have chosen for your launcher icon.

Congratulations! You have successfully updated the launcher icon for your app.

Conclusion

In this post, you learned about the different kinds of icons that are used in an Android app, as well as all the different screen resolutions that must be generated for each icon. Then you learned about the Image Asset Studio tool and how it makes generating icons for your Android app much easier.

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How to Create Android App Icons using Image Asset Studio

Creating an application interface that the user will like and will be unlikely to forget can be intimidating. But creating an attractive launcher icon for your app, that the user will first come across while looking at your app, anyway needs more brainstorming. For Android, you need to create these graphics that have to be compatible and supporting to all devices running Android, sizes varying from a smartphone to TV. The introduction of Android Image Asset Studio in Android Studio has made it easy. In this article, you will see how you can easily create your application icon in one go.

Image Asset Studio is a tool introduced in Android Studio 3. It can be used to generate app icons for all the screen densities in one go, using custom images, material design icons as well as text strings. Application icon in Android includes the following,

• Launcher Icon: represents your app and the first thing that user sees
• ActionBar Icon & Tab Icon: representing actions in the ActionBar and Tabs of the app
• Notification Icon: represents your app notification when a user is outside your app

Here is a list of icon/image sizes that you need to create for different screen densities, for each image that you use in your application. No matter if you are a good designer, creating each of these is tedious!

Image Asset Studio helps to create all these icons for all screen densities and stores them in respective density folders. It provides a preview of all the icons that will be created, in different shapes, with options to edit them. Let’s see how to create each one of them.

Run Image Asset Studio

1. In the Project Window, select the project hierarchy.
2. Right-click on the res folder and choose New -> Image Asset.

3. Create the icon for your app i.e.

• Launcher icon which may be Adaptive and Legacy Launcher Icon (if your app supports Android 8.0 or above) or just the Legacy Launcher Icon(for Android version less than or equal to 7.1)
• ActionBar Icons and Tab Icons
• notification icon as per your requirement.

4. You can select the following Asset Type. The icon appears on the right side, in the preview panel.

Custom Image

You can use custom images of PNG (recommended), JPG or GIF (avert) format and adjust it to create icons. Set the path of your custom image if you select this.

Clip Art

You can select the icons from the list of Google Material Design Icons provided in the dialog. Click on the clip art icon to get the dialog with icon set.

Text String

You can use the fonts installed on your computer to generate the icons out of the text strings. It will create these text-based icons in PNG format in respective drawable-density folders. Set the string and select the font to use it.

If you are comfortable learning from video, you can refer to this for Launcher Icons and App Bar Icons:

Creating Launcher Icon

Launcher Icons represent our app in the device home screen, on the app list screen, in the Google Play Store and everywhere else. Android 8.0 (Oreo) and above supports Adaptive Icons and can be displayed in different shapes across various platforms. Image Asset Studio provides the option to create these adaptive icons as well as the legacy icons for Android 8.0 below. It also creates web icons(512 x 512 px) that represents our app on the Google Play Store.

The Launcher Icons are stored in the res/mipmap-density folder.

Adaptive and legacy launcher icon

If your app doesn’t support android version 8.0 or above, create legacy icon only for your app.

After opening Image Asset Studio, follow the steps below to create the legacy icons for your android app.

1. For Icon Type field, select Launcher Icons (Adaptive & Legacy).
2. For Foreground Layer tab, select the Asset type to be an image, clip art or text.
3. Then for the Background Layer tab, select a Color or set the Image path for the Asset type to set the background.
4. Then the Legacy tab, check the default settings. You can choose whether you want to generate the legacy icon, round icon and the icon for the web(Google Play Store Icon).
5. Optionally

• Name: Change the name of the foreground and background layer. If the resource with the specified name exists, it will be indicated by an error message. The name can contain lowercase characters, digits and underscore only.
• Trim: Chose yes to adjust the margin between the foreground icon graphic and the background, else select no to keep the source asset as it is.
• Color: Set the color for the clip art or the text asset. Click the field, select the color, click chose and preview your icon.
• Resize: Use the slider to resize your icon. It is disabled for background layer where Color is the asset type.

7. Chose the resource directory for your image asset.

• main/res: For all source set including debug and release
• debug/res: For debugging only
• release/res: For only one version of build, overrides main source set
• custom source set: To define a new source set File -> Project structure -> app -> Build Types. Refer to Configure Build Variants for details
  Output Directories shows the list of folders in which the icons will be created in the Project view in Project Window.

Check the mipmap folders for the Launcher Icons.

Legacy launcher icon only

If your app supports android version 8.0 or above, create adaptive and legacy launcher icon for your app.

After opening Image Asset Studio, follow the steps below to create adaptive and legacy icons for your android app.

1. For Icon Type field, select Launcher Icons (Legacy Only).
2. Select the Asset type to be an image, clip art or text.
3. Optionally

• Name: Change the name of the icon if you don’t want to use the default name. If the resource with the specified name exists, an error message will indicate it. The name can contain lowercase characters, digits and underscore only.
• Trim: Chose yes to adjust the margin between the foreground icon graphic and the background, else select no to keep the source asset as it is.
• Padding: Adjust the source set padding for all four sides. You will have the review on the right side.
• Foreground: Set the color for the clip art or the text asset. Click the field, select the color, click chose and preview your icon.
• Background: Set the color for the background. Click the field, select the color, click chose and preview your icon.
• Scaling: Select crop or S hrink to fit to fit the icon size
• Shape: Select the shape to set a backdrop for the icon. For transparent, select none.
• Effect: Select dogear if you want the dogear effect for your icon, else select none.

5. Chose the resource directory for your image asset.

• main/res: For all source set including debug and release
• debug/res: For debugging only
• release/res: For only one version of the build, overrides main source set
• custom source set: To define a new source set File -> Project structure -> app -> Build Types. Refer to Configure Build Variants for details

Check the mipmap folders for the Launcher Icons.

Creating ActionBar Icons and Tab Icons

ActionBar icons are the ones present on the ActionBar that represents individual action. Whereas, the tab icons are used in the apps having multiple tabs. Using material icons for this category is recommended.

The ActionBar and Tab Icons are stored in the res/drawable-density folder.

You can also use Vector Asset Studio to have XML vectors for these categories of icons. It will reduce the size of your APK considerably.

After opening Image Asset Studio, follow the steps below to create action bar and tab icons for your android app.

1. For Icon Type field, select Action Bar and Tab Icons.
2. Select the Asset type to be an image, clip art or text.
3. Optionally

• Name: Change the name of the icon if you don’t want to use the default name. If the resource with the specified name exists, an error message will indicate it. The name can contain lowercase characters, digits and underscore only.
• Trim: Chose yes to adjust the margin between the foreground icon graphic and the background, else select no to keep the source asset as it is.
• Padding: Adjust the source set padding for all four sides. You will have the review on the right side.
• Theme: Select holo_light or holo_dark as per your app theme. Select custom to set a custom color for the icon.

5. Chose the resource directory for your image asset.

• main/res: For all source set including debug and release
• debug/res: For debugging only
• release/res: For only one version of build, overrides main source set
• custom source set: To define a new source set File -> Project structure -> app -> Build Types. Refer to Configure Build Variants for details

Check the drawable folders for the Icons created.

Creating Notification icons

To learn from the video:

The user sees the notification when he is outside your app. Notification icons come up with these notifications.

The Notification Icons are stored in the res/drawable-density folder. There are a few other folders created too.

• for Android 2.2 (API 8) or lower — icons stored in res/drawable-density
• for Android 2.3 to 2.3.7 (API 9 & 10) — icons stored in res/drawable-density-v9. Gray version of the icon is created
• Android 3 (API 11) or higher — icons stored in res/drawable-density-v11. A white version of the icon is created.

After opening Image Asset Studio, follow the steps below to create notification icons for your android app.

1. For Icon Type field, select Notification Icons.
2. Select the Asset type to be an image, clip art or text.
3. Optionally

• Name: Change the name of the icon if you don’t want to use the default name. If the resource with the specified name exists, an error message will indicate it. The name can contain lowercase characters, digits and underscore only.
• Trim: Chose yes to adjust the margin between the foreground icon graphic and the background, else select no to keep the source asset as it is.
• Padding: Adjust the source set padding for all four side. You will have the review on the right side.

5. Chose the resource directory for your image asset.

• main/res: For all source set including debug and release
• debug/res: For debugging only
• release/res: For only one version of build, overrides main source set
• custom source set: To define a new source set File -> Project structure -> app -> Build Types. Refer to Configure Build Variants for details

Check the drawable folders for the Icons created.

How to Delete an App Icon from a project

To delete the app icon,

1. Select Android View in Project Window
2. Expand the mipmap and drawable folder for the launcher and other icons respectively.
3. Select the sub-folder that matched the name of your icon. It contains the icons of all densities that you created.
4. Right-click on the sub-folder and hit delete.
   Dialog for Safe Delete appears.
5. If you want, select options to find the places where the icon is used and hit OK.
   If you chose to search for usage and the icon has any use in the project, you can view it and then confirm delete. You should delete or replace this reference to successfully compile the project. Android Studio then deletes the file from the project and the drive.
6. Chose Build -> Clean Project.

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