App icon and splash screen generator

App icon requirements in 2026

Every platform now starts from one large square image and generates the small sizes itself. What differs is who rounds the corners, whether transparency is allowed, and how much of your artwork survives the mask. Get those three right and the rest is file names.

iOS: one 1024 px square, no transparency

Since Xcode 14, an app icon can be a single 1024 × 1024 px image. Apple calls this the single size option, and it is the default for new iOS projects: Xcode generates every Home Screen, Spotlight and Settings size from it at build time. The ZIP from this tool contains an AppIcon.appiconset in that format, with a Contents.json that lists one universal 1024 px image.

Draw the icon as a full square. The Human Interface Guidelines say iOS applies its own mask to produce the rounded corners, so corners you round yourself end up with a thin border of background showing through. The same page lists the appearances iOS 26 can show an icon in: default, dark, clear and tinted. If you supply only the default, the system generates the others.

The App Store icon must be opaque. Upload one with transparent pixels, or even a fully opaque PNG that still carries an alpha channel, and App Store Connect stops the build with error ITMS-90717, “can’t be transparent nor contain an alpha channel”. Most image editors and browsers save PNGs with an alpha channel by default. This tool writes the iOS icon as an RGB PNG with no alpha channel at all, flattened onto your background.

Android: launcher icons, adaptive layers and the Play Store icon

A legacy Android launcher icon is 48 dp. Android scales density buckets in a 3:4:6:8:12:16 ratio, so that is 48 px at mdpi, 72 at hdpi, 96 at xhdpi, 144 at xxhdpi and 192 at xxxhdpi. Launcher icons go in mipmap folders rather than drawable, because launchers sometimes show an icon up to 25% larger than its density calls for and need the next size up.

Google Play needs its own 512 × 512 px icon: a 32-bit PNG in sRGB, at most 1024 KB, as a full square. Play rounds the corners and adds the shadow itself, so a shadow or rounded corners in your file get applied twice.

Adaptive icons and safe zones

Since Android 8.0, the launcher icon is an adaptive icon: a foreground layer and a background layer, each 108 × 108 dp. The phone’s launcher picks the shape. A Pixel shows a circle, other phones show a squircle or a rounded square, and the same app can look different on two devices side by side.

Of the 108 dp, only the middle 72 dp is ever visible. The outer 18 dp on each side is spare canvas for the parallax and pulse effects some launchers apply. Inside the visible part, Android guarantees only a 66 dp circle in the middle. That circle is the safe zone: 61% of the full layer’s width, or 92% of the visible square. Anything outside it can be cut off by a circular mask.

Android 13 added a third, optional layer: a monochrome image the system tints to match the wallpaper when the user turns on themed icons. It should be a single-colour silhouette. This tool exports one whenever your foreground is a symbol, letters or an image with transparency, since a full-bleed photo has no shape to silhouette.

The preview above draws the full adaptive layer with the visible square dashed and the safe zone circled, so you can see what each launcher will keep.

Splash screens in Expo

Android 12 and later draw the splash screen themselves, through the SplashScreen API: a background colour and an icon in the middle, masked to a circle. An icon without its own background is 288 dp, of which a 192 dp circle is visible. Full-screen splash images no longer work there, which is why Expo moved to a small centred image too.

In Expo, the splash screen is configured through the expo-splash-screen config plugin. Its keys are image, imageWidth (default 100), resizeMode (contain, cover or native), backgroundColor and a dark object for dark mode. Expo’s guide recommends a 1024 × 1024 px PNG with a transparent background, which is what splash-icon.png in the ZIP is. The artwork is kept inside the visible circle, so Android 12 does not crop it.

Icons and splash screens are native resources. After changing them, run npx expo prebuild --cleanor make a new EAS build. A Metro reload or an over-the-air update will not change them, which accounts for most “my new icon is not showing” questions.

NativeExpress has the same job built in: yarn theme:icon generates the icon and splash screen inside the template.

Common reasons icons get rejected

• Alpha channel on the App Store icon. ITMS-90717, covered above. It is checked at upload, before a reviewer sees the build.
• Content above a 4+ rating. App Review guideline 2.3.8 asks for icons that suit all audiences, even for apps rated higher.
• Mismatched icons. The same guideline asks that your app name and every icon, including alternate icons, look like the same app.
• Other people’s artwork.Guideline 4.1(c) bans another developer’s icon or brand in yours, 2.3.10 bans other platforms’ icons, and 5.2.5 bans Apple emoji inside apps.
• Promotional badges on Google Play.Google’s icon specification rules out text or graphics that suggest a ranking, a deal, a Play programme or anything misleading. “Free”, “#1” and “Sale” do not belong on the icon.