Default android app icon

How To Change Your Android App Icon

An adaptive icon is an icon that consist of two layers, the foreground layer and background layer like the default icon of an android app. This makes it possible for launchers to have some visual effects. Adaptive icons work on android 8.0 (API level 26) and above.

Open android studio -> res folder-> drawable. You’ll see ic_launcher foreground.xml which will be the white default icon we are going to replace.

And below is ic_launcher_background, the greenish background we will also replace.

In the mipmap folder -> ic_launcher -> ic_launcher.xml contains an adaptive icon.xml which combines the foreground and background layer.

So to create an adaptive icon we right click on Res Folder -> Image assets. Then we select select launcher Icons(Adaptive and legacy) as Icon Type.

For the foreground layer you can replace the name and select image, clip art or text as Asset Type. In this example we’ll use alarm icon. You can also resize the asset type if it’s beyond the safe zone

In the background layer we can also choose between image or color as asset type.

Select next then finish. The default default launcher background will be overridden. You can check it out in the mipmap -> ic_launcher.xml

You can reach me on twitter @dope_soul if you have any questions. Happy coding.

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Designing Adaptive Icons

Android O introduces a new app icon format: adaptive icons. Adaptive icons can make devices more coherent by unifying the shape of all app icons and opening the door to interesting visual effects. This post explains how they work and explores some techniques for designing them.

For a look back at where this feature has come from, see:

Understanding Android Adaptive Icons

Android O introduces a new format for app icons called adaptive icons. To better understand the motivation and…

Fundamentals

Size and shape

Adaptive icons are 108dp*108dp in size but are masked to a maximum of 72dp*72dp. Different devices can supply different masks which must be convex in shape and may reach a minimum of 33dp from the center in places.

Because of the minimum reach of the mask, you can consider a centered 66dp diameter circle as a safe zone, guaranteed not to be clipped.

Keylines

Keyline shapes are the foundation of the icon grid helping your icon’s visual proportions be consistent with other apps’ icons . The keyline shapes are:

• Circles: 52dp & 36dp diameter
• Square: 44dp*44dp, 4dp corner radius
• Rectangles: 52dp*36dp & 36dp*52dp, 4dp corner radius

See the templates included at the end of this article.

Layers

Adaptive icons are actually made up of two layers; a foreground and a background. Both layers are 108dp*108dp; the background must be fully opaque while the foreground may include transparency. These layers are stacked on top of each other.

Providing elements in two separate layers which are larger than the displayed (i.e. masked) size creates the opportunity for interesting visual treatments and animations. Exactly what effects may be applied and when is still something of an open question; it is up to device and launcher makers to decide. Here are some simple examples you could imagine: parallax or pulsing by independently translating or scaling each layer before applying the mask.

As the 108dp*108dp icons are masked up to 72dp*72dp, the outer 18dp on each side can be considered the “extra” content, only revealed during motion.

Design Considerations

The material design guidelines for creating product icons still very much apply. Specifically the icon anatomy, shadows and finish remain, but you can now place elements in either the foreground or background layers yielding different effects.

Now I’m sure that many icons will be well served by placing their brand mark in the foreground on a solid colored background and calling it a day. This will ensure that your icon fits in well on the device. What excites me is how we as a community will explore these new constraints and find interesting, playful and innovative ways to make delightful icons. Here are a few things to keep in mind and a few ideas to potentially explore.

Clipping

Due to the dynamic nature of adaptive icons, you cannot know the exact mask shape that will be applied. For that reason it’s best to place any critical elements like your brand mark inside the safe-zone and to stay away from the mask edges.

Background Anchoring

Placing some elements which might appear to be foreground, actually in the background means that they will move independently. For example the calculator app places most elements in the foreground, but the equals button on the accent color block in the background:

This creates interesting opportunities for motion where you visually anchor on the bright color block, but it moves less than the foreground elements, creating a sensation of depth.

Masked masks

I think that there may be interesting opportunities for placing masking elements in the foreground — that is solid elements with areas cut out. Consider a possible icon for the Google Play Store, this might be constructed in an ‘obvious’ manner, that is placing the colored triangle in the foreground atop a white background.

Instead of doing this, we might use a colorful background and a white foreground with the triangle subtracted to produce the same static output:

This setup would allow the colors ‘peeking through’ to move independently of the mask revealing different parts of the background when translated or scaled.

Light & shadows

The interaction of lighting effects and shadows placed in separate layers can have interesting results. For example using the long-shadow technique on the foreground element can have a playful interaction as it moves within the masked area. Similarly lighting effects can be placed in the foreground layer rather than being baked into the background. For example, a ‘finish’ layer can be placed in the foreground to emulate a light source. Placing this in the foreground means that it will play over the background layer when under motion, moving at a different rate to it.

Be careful not to create an effect that doesn’t make sense e.g. a shadow detaching from a foreground element or moving behind a background element. Also remember that many icons are likely to be seen together so be conservative with bespoke lighting effects and stick close to the material guidelines.

Leave behinds

You could place elements in the background layer which are completely obscured by the foreground layer and only revealed under motion.

Resources and tools

Here is my sketch file which you can use as a template whilst creating adaptive icons. It includes the icon grid, keyline shapes and safe area. It’s implemented as a symbol so changing the master element will update the copies giving you a preview with different masks applied.

I’ve also uploaded an Adobe Illustrator template if that’s more your thing.

Additionally check out these other resources i’ve come across:

Adaptive Icon Playground

In developing adaptive icons, I’ve come to appreciate that many of the subtleties come from the interaction of the foreground and background elements when motion effects are applied. This is still something of an open question as we are yet to see how device and launcher makers will implement this. To help investigate this space, I’ve created a small test app to help you evaluate it whilst creating your icon:

The app displays all applications installed on your device with adaptive icons. Scrolling the grid applies parallax effects to the icons and touching an icon applies a scale effect. You can configure the strength of the effects and change the mask applied to all icons. Hopefully this tool helps you to envisage how your icon will appear and may move on different devices.

You can download an APK or checkout the source on github:

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Understanding Android Adaptive Icons

Android O introduces a new format for app icons called adaptive icons. To better understand the motivation and potential of this feature it’s useful to take a look at what it’s replacing.

While Android’s icon guidelines have evolved over time, they have always promoted using unique shapes. I was a huge fan of this! I held that it really helped users to locate the app they wanted to launch. If you want to get nostalgic you can listen to Roman Nurik and I talk about this to 6 whole minutes in an old video we made.

Here’s the ‘traditional’ icon (created by Roman) from Plaid, an app I work on. I believed that the distinct shape helped it to stand out, making it easier to find:

But it’s not all sunshine and rainbows in distinct-shape-icon-land. The flipside of this near-complete creative freedom is lack of consistency. When each individual app is responsible for shape, size and drop-shadow (which is baked into the icon) then the inevitable consequence is that they vary widely. Here’s an example of icons just from Google showing how they at one time varied:

Now admittedly the above image is from 2012 and things have improved a lot in the meantime; especially with the extra guidance in the material guidelines. Nonetheless, I’ve come to believe that the current system places too much responsibility on app developers; giving us too much scope to detract from the overall experience..

When we’re working on an app, we can become laser-focused on it. We rightly spend huge amounts of time pouring over the details that make it unique. We think about it in isolation. But that’s not how users see it; no app is an island and we need to recognize that it exists alongside many other apps on a device. As such it needs to get along. This is true for your entire app but it’s all the more important with elements like app icons which appear side by side. With this framing we can see how instead of our idealized situation, the reality often ends up being more like this:

In response to this problem, a whole cottage industry has sprung up: custom launchers offering icon packs to replace app’s icons or normalize their size. Devices also started shipping with launchers adding backgrounds to app icons to enforce consistency & brand their platform.

Indeed Google’s launcher will start placing icons of apps which target Android-O but do not supply an adaptive icon onto a background (scaling down their non-adaptive icon).

While normalizing icon shapes or sizes is understandable, altering an icon without input from the app developer can’t lead to the best outcome.

Android 7.1 introduced roundIcon as an attempt to bring some consistency here but this was pretty restrictive to OEMs looking to differentiate their devices (i.e. only supporting circular icons) and lacked any kind of validation (developers could supply any shaped icon and pinky-swear that it was round!).

I’d characterize the situation as lacking a well defined contract between the app icons and launchers which will display them. Balancing the complete freedom of icon design against a desire for consistent display currently places responsibilities in the wrong camps. Launchers try to resize icons but don’t understand the content, like which elements are critical and shouldn’t be touched. App icons need to keep up with any guideline changes to ensure they bake in correct sizing/padding or shadow information. I see adaptive icons as making this contract clearer; becoming more explicit about what an app must supply and how a launcher will consume and display it.

For icon makers, it’s easy to see this as losing some freedom. I think this is actually more of a shift rather than a reduction. Adaptive icons introduce new and interesting constraints that open up new creative possibilities. Join me in part 2: designing adaptive icons to explore these.

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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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