App icon generator

Your icon is the one asset people see everywhere: in search results, on the product page, in top charts, in ads, in the share sheet and, once installed, on the home screen dozens of times a day. In a search result it often sits next to five or six competitors, at the size of a fingernail, and it has a fraction of a second to say what the app is and why it is worth a tap.

That is why the icon moves conversion more than most product page changes. A clearer silhouette or a stronger color can lift the share of people who tap through from search, and every point gained there compounds with your keywords and your ranking: the stores reward apps that convert the traffic they are shown.

The icon also carries trust. A blurry, cropped or off-brand icon signals an abandoned app, while a sharp, consistent one reads as a product that is cared for. Getting every size crisp on every device is the minimum this tool takes care of.

Apple asks for one 1024 × 1024 px icon for the App Store and, depending on your Xcode version and deployment target, a set of smaller sizes for the home screen, Spotlight, Settings and notifications. Recent Xcode versions can derive them from the single 1024 image, but shipping the classic set keeps older targets and every slot pixel-perfect. This generator writes a ready-to-drop AppIcon.appiconset folder with its Contents.json.

The rules that cause most rejections or ugly results:

• App Store icon: 1024 × 1024 px, PNG, opaque, no alpha channel, no rounded corners (iOS applies its own mask).
• iPhone: 120 and 180 px (home screen), 80 and 120 px (Spotlight), 58 and 87 px (Settings), 40 and 60 px (notifications).
• iPad: 152 and 167 px (home screen), 76 px, plus 20, 29, 40 and 80 px for notifications, Settings and Spotlight.
• Keep the full square filled: transparent areas turn black on iOS.
• Keep important details away from the corners, which the squircle mask cuts off.
• Avoid text and photos that become unreadable below 60 px.

Since Android 8, launchers use adaptive icons: a foreground and a background layer of 108 × 108 dp, of which only the central 72 dp are visible, cut by a mask the device maker chooses (circle, squircle, rounded square, teardrop). The same icon can therefore look round on one phone and square on another, which is why the previews show several masks.

Legacy launcher icons are still used by older devices and some launchers, and Google Play has its own listing icon. This generator exports both:

• Launcher icons: ic_launcher.png in mipmap-mdpi (48 px), hdpi (72 px), xhdpi (96 px), xxhdpi (144 px) and xxxhdpi (192 px).
• Round icons: ic_launcher_round.png at the same sizes, for launchers that ask for a circle.
• Google Play icon: 512 × 512 px, 32-bit PNG, up to 1024 KB, full square: Play applies rounded corners and a shadow itself.
• Play policy: no misleading badges such as "#1" or "free", no store logos, no content that does not represent the app.
• For adaptive icons, keep the logo inside the central 66 dp safe zone so no mask can cut it.

The best icons are simple enough to be recognized at 29 px and distinctive enough to be found again among a hundred other apps. Start from one idea: a single object, a letter or a shape that belongs to your brand, rather than a collage of features.

Check the icon on light and dark wallpapers, next to the apps of your category, and at the smallest sizes before you ship. If it disappears in a row of competitors, increase contrast or change the dominant color rather than adding details. Use the padding slider to give the glyph room to breathe, and the previews to see how each mask treats your corners.

Finally, stay consistent: the icon should match your screenshots, your ads and the app itself, so that people who saw an ad recognize the app in search results.

Opinions about icons are cheap; store data is not. Both stores let you test icons on real traffic. On the App Store, Product Page Optimization runs up to three alternative icons against the original, each shipped in the app binary as an alternate icon. On Google Play, Store Listing Experiments test icons directly from the Play Console, without a new release.

Test one change at a time (color, glyph or background), give each test enough traffic to reach significance, usually a few thousand page views per variant, and watch the conversion rate rather than raw installs. A winning icon can then be rolled out with confidence, and the next test can start from it.

appwin's ASO module follows your apps' keyword rankings, product page conversion and installs day by day, for iOS and Android. When you change your icon, the change shows on the timeline next to your metrics, so you can see whether conversion from search and browse moved after the release, and compare with your competitors' own changes.

Because appwin also runs your support, community, push and analytics from the same dashboard, you see the full effect of an icon change, from the first impression in the store to the retention of the users it brought in. Creating an account is free.