Adaptive icons

An adaptive icon, or AdaptiveIconDrawable, can display differently depending on individual device capabilities and user theming. Adaptive icons are primarily used by the launcher on the home screen, but they can also be used in shortcuts, the Settings app, sharing dialogs, and the overview screen. Adaptive icons are used across all Android form factors.

In contrast to bitmap images, adaptive icons can adapt to different use cases:

  • Different shapes: an adaptive icon can display a variety of shapes across different device models. For example, it can display a circular shape on one OEM device, and display a squircle (a shape between a square and a circle) on another device. Each device OEM must provide a mask, which the system uses to render all adaptive icons with the same shape.

    A gif showing a repeating animation of the same sample Android icon, showing different shapes depending on the mask used—a circle and then two different kinds of squircles
    Figure 1. Adaptive icons support a variety of masks, which vary from one device to another.

  • Visual effects: an adaptive icon supports a variety of engaging visual effects, which display when users place or move the icon around the home screen.

    A gif showing examples of two circle-shaped Android sample icons, animated to show user response. The first icon shows the Android logo wobbling left then right, then up and down inside the circle. The second icon expands and then contracts again.
    Figure 2. Examples of visual effects displayed by an adaptive icon.

  • User theming: starting with Android 13 (API level 33), users can theme their adaptive icons. If a user enables themed app icons, by turning on the Themed icons toggle in system settings, and the launcher supports this feature, the system uses the coloring of the user's chosen wallpaper and theme to determine the tint color.

    An image showing examples of three Android devices, each one showing a different user theme with different tints: the first shows a wallpaper with dark tinting; the second shows a golden-tinted wallpaper; the third shows a wallpaper with light grey with bluish tints wallpaper. In each example, the icons have inherited the tinting of the wallpaper and blend in perfectly.
    Figure 3. Adaptive icons inheriting from the user's wallpaper and themes.

    In the following scenarios, the home screen doesn't display the themed app icon, and instead displays the adaptive or standard app icon:

    • If the user doesn't enable themed app icons.
    • If your app doesn't provide a monochromatic app icon.
    • If the launcher doesn't support themed app icons.

Design adaptive icons

To ensure that your adaptive icon supports different shapes, visual effects, and user theming, the design must meet the following requirements:

  • You must provide two layers for the color version of the icon: one for the foreground, and one for the background. The layers can be either vectors or bitmaps, though vectors are preferred.

    An image showing an example of a foreground layer (left image) and a background layer (right image). The foreground shows the 16-sided icon of a sample Android logo centered within a 66x66 safe zone. The safe zone is centered inside of a 108x108 container. The background shows the same measured dimensions for the safe zone and the container, but only a blue background and no logo.
    Figure 4. Adaptive icons defined using foreground and background layers. The 66x66 safe zone depicted is the area that is never clipped by a shaped mask defined by an OEM.
    An image showing the icon from the preceding image overlaid on a circular mask.
    Figure 5. An example of how foreground and background layers look together with a circular mask applied.

  • If you want to support user theming of app icons, provide a single layer for the monochrome version of the icon.

    An image showing an example of a monochromatic icon layer (left image) and color previews (right image). The monochromatic layer shows the 16-sided icon of a sample Android logo centered within a 66x66 safe zone. The safe zone is centered inside of a 108x108 container. The color previews show this layer display when applied to differently colored user themes (orange, pink, yellow, and green).
    Figure 6. A monochromatic icon layer (left) with examples of color previews (right).

  • Size all layers to 108x108 dp.

  • Use icons with clean edges. The layers must not have masks or background shadows around the outline of the icon.

  • Use a logo that's at least 48x48 dp. It must not exceed 66x66 dp, because the inner 66x66 dp of the icon appears within the masked viewport.

The outer 18 dp on each of the four sides of the layers is reserved for masking and to create visual effects such as parallax or pulsing.

To learn how to create adaptive icons using Android Studio, see our Android App icon Figma template or Android Studio documentation for creating launcher icons. Also, check out the blog post Designing Adaptive Icons .

Add your adaptive icon to your app

Adaptive icons, just like non-adaptive icons, are specified using the android:icon attribute in the app manifest.

An optional attribute, android:roundIcon, is used by launchers that represent apps with circular icons, and may be useful if your app's icon includes a circular background as a core part of its design. Such launchers are required to generate app icons by applying a circular mask to android:roundIcon, and this guarantee may enable you to optimize the appearance of your app icon by, for example, slightly enlarging the logo and ensuring that when cropped, the circular background is full bleed.

The following code snippet illustrates both of these attributes, but most apps only specify android:icon:

<application
    ...
    android:icon="@mipmap/ic_launcher"
    android:roundIcon="@mipmap/ic_launcher_round"
    ...>
</application>

Next, save your adaptive icon to res/mipmap-anydpi-v26/ic_launcher.xml. Use the <adaptive-icon> element to define the foreground, background, and monochromatic layer resources for your icons. The <foreground>, <background>, and <monochrome> inner elements support both vector and bitmap images.

The following example shows how to define <foreground>, <background>, and <monochrome> elements inside <adaptive-icon>:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
...
<adaptive-icon xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android">
    <background android:drawable="@drawable/ic_launcher_background" />
    <foreground android:drawable="@drawable/ic_launcher_foreground" />

    // Starting with Android 13 (API level 33), you can opt-in to providing a
    // <monochrome> drawable.
    <monochrome android:drawable="@drawable/ic_launcher_monochrome" />
</adaptive-icon>
...

You can also define drawables as elements by inlining them into the <foreground>, <background>, and <monochrome> elements. The following snippet shows an example of doing this with the foreground drawable.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
...
<foreground>
   <inset
       android:insetBottom="18dp"
       android:insetLeft="18dp"
       android:insetRight="18dp"
       android:insetTop="18dp">
       <shape android:shape="oval">
           <solid android:color="#0000FF" />
       </shape>
   </inset>
</foreground>
...

If you want to apply the same mask and visual effect to your shortcuts as regular adaptive icons, use one of the following techniques:

  • For static shortcuts, use the <adaptive-icon> element.
  • For dynamic shortcuts, call the createWithAdaptiveBitmap() method when you create them.

For more information about implementing adaptive icons, see Implementing Adaptive Icons. For more information about shortcuts, see App shortcuts overview.

Additional resources

See the following resources for additional information about designing and implementing adaptive icons.