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.

An adaptive icon 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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 .

To add an adaptive icon to your app, update the android:icon attribute in your app manifest to specify a drawable resource. You can also define an icon drawable resource using the android:roundIcon attribute, but only if you require a different icon asset for circular masks—for example, if your branding relies on a circular shape.

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

Next, in res/mipmap-anydpi-v26/ic_launcher.xml, create alternative drawable resources in your app for backward compatibility with Android 8.0 (API level 26). Use the element to define the foreground, background, and monochromatic layer drawables for your icons. The , , and inner elements support the android:drawable attribute.

The following example shows how to define , , and elements inside :

You can also define drawables as elements by enclosing them in the , , and elements. The following snippet shows an example of doing this with the foreground drawable.

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

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