Icons

Each app has an icon. For most apps, the user will see that icon in their launcher, for whatever activity (or activities) are advertised as belonging in the launcher. In addition, this icon can appear in other places, such as in the Settings app.

App icons are drawable resources. Except when they are mipmap resources. And except when they are multiple resources, combined together at runtime to create an image with a “squircle” background. And…

Are you confused yet?

In theory, setting up app icons would be quite simple, and for years that was the case. Nowadays, setting up an app icon is unnecessarily complex, though at least Android Studio has an Asset Studio tool to try to make it a bit simpler.

In this chapter, we will explore what it takes to set up one of these app icons.

App Icons… And Everything Else

Google has been making app icons increasingly complicated over the past few years:

• App icons are mipmap resources, while everything else is a drawable resource
• Android 7.1 introduced the concept of a separate “round icon” that an app can have, which would be used in place of the regular app icon on certain Android 7.1 devices… then dropped this feature with Android 8.0
• Android 8.0 introduced the concept of “adaptive icons”, where you have to provide separate “foreground” and “background” images, mostly so that certain home screen launchers can shape the background image as they want (square, round, “squircle”, etc.)