mobile
App Icon Sizes in 2026: iOS, Android, and Every File Your App Actually Needs
What app icons require in 2026 — iOS light/dark/tinted modes, Liquid Glass, Android adaptive and themed icons, Expo and Flutter configs — and the surprisingly short list of files that covers it all.
Ask “what size should my app icon be?” and you’ll get answers from three different eras: ancient lists of seventeen iPhone PNG sizes, 2020-era Android adaptive-icon tutorials, and fresh confusion about iOS 18’s tinted mode and iOS 26’s Liquid Glass. All of them are partially right, which is worse than being wrong. Here’s the current state of app icons across every platform — what’s actually required, what’s legacy, and what changed recently — plus a free generator that produces the whole set from one image.
The 2026 short answer
| Platform | What you actually need | Format |
|---|---|---|
| iOS (modern) | One 1024×1024 icon + dark and tinted variants | Xcode appiconset, 3 PNGs |
| iOS (legacy/frameworks) | The 17-size matrix, 20pt–83.5pt @1x/2x/3x | Individual PNGs |
| CarPlay | 60pt at @2x and @3x (120/180 px) | PNGs |
| Android | Adaptive icon: foreground + background + monochrome layers | PNGs per density + XML |
| Android (legacy) | Flat launcher icons, 48–192 px | PNGs in mipmap folders |
| Google Play | One 512×512 listing icon | PNG |
| macOS | Ten sizes, 16–1024 px, shape baked into the file | Mac appiconset |
| watchOS | One 1024×1024 (system applies circular mask) | PNG |
| Expo / Flutter | Single 1024 px images + a config block | PNGs + app.json / yaml |
Two big simplifications hide in that table. Since Xcode 14, iOS needs only one 1024px source — Xcode generates every device size at build time; the 17-size matrix is purely for older projects and cross-platform frameworks that ask for individual files. And builders like Expo and Flutter generate densities themselves, so handing them density folders is wasted effort — they want single high-resolution images and a config entry.
iOS 18 made your icon three icons
Since iOS 18, users can render their Home Screen in light, dark, or tinted mode, and each pulls different artwork from your asset catalog:
- Light — your normal icon, full square, no transparency (the App Store rejects alpha in the light 1024).
- Dark — ideally your mark on a transparent background; iOS supplies the dark backdrop. Ship nothing and iOS auto-darkens your light icon, usually badly.
- Tinted — the one that surprises everyone: iOS asks for a grayscale image and maps its luminance into the user’s chosen color. Whether your icon survives depends on its contrast structure, not its colors — a mid-gray logo turns to mush.
iOS 26’s Liquid Glass redesign layered more on top: a rounder corner mask, real-time glass rendering, and a new layered .icon format built in Apple’s Icon Composer (which adds a “clear” appearance). The reassuring part: a plain PNG icon set remains fully valid — the system applies the glass treatment automatically. You don’t need Icon Composer to ship.
Android: layers, masks, and Material You
Android went a different direction — every launcher masks icons into its own shape, so an adaptive icon is layers on a 108dp canvas of which only the central 66dp safe zone is guaranteed visible:
- Foreground — your mark, inside the safe zone.
- Background — a solid color or full-bleed image.
- Monochrome — added in Android 13: a silhouette the launcher tints to match the user’s wallpaper for themed icons. Skip it and your icon turns into a generic gray blob when users enable theming.
Add the legacy flat icons for pre-Android-8 devices, the 512px Play Store listing icon, and the ic_launcher.xml that wires the layers together.
The platform nobody warns you about: macOS
iOS and Android both take full-square artwork and apply their own masks. macOS is the opposite: the icon file itself carries the shape — a rounded square floating on a transparent margin (the “Big Sur grid”: an 824px shape centered in a 1024px canvas). Export a full-bleed square to a Mac target and it looks glaringly wrong next to every other dock icon. This bites everyone shipping a Catalyst or Electron app for the first time.
Common rejections and mistakes
- Transparency in the iOS light icon — App Store validation rejects it. Flatten onto a background.
- Pre-rounded corners on iOS — double-masking leaves dark slivers at the corners. Always submit a full square.
- Artwork outside the Android safe zone — cropped by circular masks on Pixel launchers.
- No monochrome layer — your icon breaks under Android 13+ themed icons.
- A tinted variant nobody checked — grayscale conversion without a contrast pass produces an illegible smudge. Preview it before shipping.
Generate and preview the whole set
The App Icon Generator takes one square image and produces everything in the table above as a single zip: the Xcode appiconset with light/dark/tinted variants, the legacy matrix, CarPlay, the complete Android adaptive/legacy/Play Store set, the shaped macOS appiconset, watchOS sizes, and a builders/ folder with ready-to-merge Expo app.json and flutter_launcher_icons.yaml configs. Before you download, it previews your icon the way each platform will actually render it — the iOS tinted mode with a color picker, Android’s circle/squircle/rounded masks, the Material You silhouette, the macOS shape — and a built-in refine panel handles scaling, backgrounds (it auto-flattens transparent sources so the App Store won’t reject them), tinted contrast, and silhouette tuning. Everything runs in your browser; unreleased app artwork never touches a server.
Preparing the rest of your listing? The App Store Screenshot generator handles your store images, and if your product has a web presence, the favicon guide covers the browser side of the same problem.