App Icon Generator

What size should an app icon be?

One 1024 x 1024 pixel square. Both stores take their largest asset at that size, every other size is a reduction of it, and no platform asks for anything bigger. Design once at 1024 and the rest is arithmetic.

What differs between platforms is not the master, it is what each one wants done to it: Apple wants it opaque, Google wants it full square and unrounded, macOS wants it inset inside its canvas, and Android wants it split into layers with the middle protected.

App icon sizes for every platform

Android densities, for the launcher icon: mdpi 1x, hdpi 1.5x, xhdpi 2x, xxhdpi 3x, xxxhdpi 4x. A 108dp layer is 432 pixels at xxxhdpi.

Why most generators hand you twenty files you do not need

Since Xcode 14, the asset catalog has a Single Size option: you supply one 1024 x 1024 image and Xcode produces every size the system asks for during the build. The set of 14 separate files that generators have been producing since 2014 has been unnecessary for years.

It is not harmful. It is just noise, and it is the reason people believe icon generation is a chore that needs a tool in the first place. This page writes one file by default. The legacy set is a checkbox, for anyone pinned to an older toolchain, and it is off until you ask.

macOS is the exception, and it is worth being clear about it: the single-size shortcut is iOS only. A Mac app still needs all 10 sizes in its asset catalog, from 16 x 16 up to 1024 x 1024.

The two things that actually get an icon rejected

iOS dark and tinted icons, and what Icon Composer changed

Since iOS 18 an icon can ship three appearances: the default, a dark variant with a transparent background so the system background shows through, and a tinted variant supplied as grayscale which the system recolours. All three are 1024 x 1024, and all three live in the same asset catalog entry.

This generator writes the dark and tinted files, with one honest limitation. A real dark variant means redrawing the artwork so nothing sinks into black, and no tool can do that from a finished flat icon. If your source has a transparent background, what you get here is the correct shape of the thing: your symbol on transparency, and the same symbol in grayscale. If your source is an opaque square, the variants are that square darkened and desaturated, which will pass validation and look like a flat tile. The generator says so rather than letting you find out on a device.

Xcode 26 moved again. Liquid Glass icons are built in Icon Composer from separate opaque layers and saved as a .icon file, so the system can apply depth, specular highlights and refraction at render time. One .icon replaces the default, dark and tinted entries in the asset catalog entirely. That is not something a browser can produce, and any tool claiming to generate Liquid Glass icons from a flat PNG is generating a picture of one. What this page gives you is the flattened master Icon Composer wants as a starting point, plus the icons every OS before 26 still runs on.

Android adaptive icons and the safe zone

An Android launcher icon is two layers, each 108 x 108 dp: a background and a foreground. The device manufacturer supplies the mask, which is why the same icon is a circle on one phone and a squircle on another, and why the layers are larger than the visible result. The extra area is what the system moves during the parallax effect when you drag an icon around.

Only the middle 66 x 66 dp is guaranteed to survive every mask. Google's own page also describes an 18dp reserved margin on each side, which leaves 72dp rather than 66dp, and it does not reconcile the two figures. This tool enforces the smaller one, because it is the figure attached to the phrase “never clipped”, and shows you the circular mask because that is the one that crops hardest.

Rather than assume, the generator counts: it measures what fraction of your opaque artwork falls outside the safe circle and reports it as a percentage. If that overflow is a background, it does not matter. If it is part of a wordmark, it is the difference between your app name and most of your app name.

There is a third layer worth adding. Themed icons let the launcher recolour your icon to match the wallpaper, and Android 13 applies them only to apps that supply a monochrome layer. From Android 16 QPR2 the system generates one for apps that do not, but a generated layer is a guess about which parts of your artwork carry the meaning. Supplying your own takes no longer than ticking the box above.

The Google Play listing icon is not your launcher icon

Two separate assets, confused constantly. The launcher icon ships inside your APK and is the adaptive one described above. The listing icon is uploaded in Play Console and is what appears in search, in the charts and at the top of your store page: 512 x 512 pixels, a 32-bit PNG in sRGB, under 1024KB.

Google asks for a full square with the artwork filling it, and applies a rounded mask of 30% of the icon size and a drop shadow after upload. Bake either in yourself and it happens twice: the corners get rounded off an already rounded shape, and the icon reads as a shrunken tile floating inside its own slot. The file size limit is the other one that catches people, and it is real: a photographic or noisy 512px PNG can cross 1MB, so the generator encodes the icon and shows you the actual weight rather than assuming it fits.

The listing icon is not the only graphic Play Console will block a release over. It also wants a 1024 x 500 feature graphic, with its own set of rules about safe areas and text, which the feature graphic generator handles the same way this page handles icons.

macOS wants the icon smaller than the canvas

This is the one that surprises people shipping their first Mac app. macOS does not mask your artwork for you the way iOS does. It expects the rounded square already drawn and already inset: an 824 x 824 tile centred on a 1024 x 1024 canvas, leaving 100 pixels of transparent margin on each side for the system drop shadow.

Fill the whole canvas instead and your icon renders about 22 percent wider than every neighbour in the Dock. It is not rejected, nothing warns you, it simply looks wrong next to Apple's own icons forever. Leaving the full bleed option above switched off draws the tile on Apple's grid. Switch it on only if you are handing the result to Icon Composer or targeting macOS 26, both of which apply their own mask.

How to make an app icon

1. 1

   Export your artwork at 1024 x 1024

   Square, and at least 1024 pixels on each side. If the icon has a symbol that should sit on its own, export it with a transparent background: that is what makes a real iOS dark variant and a correct Android foreground layer possible.

2. 2

   Drop it in and pick your platforms

   iOS, macOS, Android and web are all on by default. The background colour is sampled from the edge of your artwork and is used wherever transparency is not allowed, which is the App Store icon, the Play listing icon and the Android background layer.

3. 3

   Check the artwork against the Android safe zone

   The generator measures how much of your opaque artwork falls outside the 66dp circle that no manufacturer mask will clip. If a wordmark is crossing it, pull the artwork in with the scale control until the circle preview stops cutting anything you care about.

4. 4

   Clear the checks

   Sources under 1024, non-square sources, transparency being flattened, iOS variants generated from an opaque source, and a Play icon over the 1024KB limit are all reported before you download rather than after you upload.

5. 5

   Download and drop the folders in

   The archive has one folder per platform. The iOS and macOS folders are asset catalogs you drag straight into Xcode, the Android folder mirrors your res directory, and a README explains why the iOS folder holds a single file.

Common app icon questions

Where these rules come from

Every size, format and limit on this page is from Apple's or Google's own documentation. Where the two of them contradict themselves, which happens on the Android safe zone and on the macOS mask, the page says so rather than picking a number and presenting it as settled.

• Apple, Configuring your app icon
• Apple, Human Interface Guidelines: App icons
• Android, Create app icons
• Google Play, Icon design specifications

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