These two layers are displayed independently from one another, which allows the device to show the proper combination of drawables. In this scenario, we set the foreground drawable to the logo we just added and the background drawable to a color defined in our colors.xml file. In this piece of XML we are setting both the foreground and background layer of the icon. Put the following into both of these files: These will contain our icon definitions for the various scenarios. In this folder, we create two empty XML files named ic_launcher.xml and ic_launcher_round.xml. Next up, we will create a folder (if it doesn’t already exist) named mipmap-anydpi-v26 within our Resources folder. This is a folder structure that will want to get your image in various sizes, so it can be shown correctly in the various places on your device that your icon shows up. It needs to reside in the mipmap folders of your project. The first thing we will do is add that icon to our app. This post assumes you already have a PNG version of your icon’s subject and won’t go in-depth into making that icon. Adaptive icons solve these discrepancies by creating a layering system, where the actual subject of your icon sits on a different layer that gets overlayed on top of a round or square icon surface. Some devices prefer round icons, whereas others might favor a rounded rectangle type design. Their use as a new icon format is to cater to the different shape varieties that device manufacturers like to include in their Android version. So I might’ve been living with a horrible icon for a while now.

Ugly springboard much? The story behind adaptive iconsĪdaptive icons were introduced in Android 8.0 (Oreo, or API Level 26) already. So if you want to get started, you can probably gather a lot of the code needed from there. So my goal for this post is to describe how we can fix this! The code for this can be found in this PR on the GitHub repo. You can tell in the screenshot of the springboard below that one icon kind of stands out a lot. I came across the issue of my Android icons not looking very fly when I was working on my MVP app. I noticed I hadn’t blogged for a while either, so it’s time to kill a few birds with this one little stone in my hand, eh? Recently I’ve picked up a few little projects again after having been on a hiatus of sorts.

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