App Icon Sizes in 2026: Layouts, Layers and Icon Composer

App icon sizes used to mean a long table: one image for the Home Screen, another for Spotlight, another for Settings, each at two or three scales. That table has mostly gone. With the layered icons Apple introduced in June 2025 for iOS 26 and its other 2025 releases, you design one layout per platform and the system makes the smaller sizes. This guide sets out what Apple asks for now, platform by platform. Apple's specifications below come from its own pages as of 5 March 2026.

Shipping on Android too? The Google Play version of this guide is Android App Icon Sizes: Play Store, Adaptive and Themed.

The short version

• iPhone, iPad and Mac share one layout: a 1024 by 1024 pixel square. The system rounds the corners.
• Apple Watch uses 1088 by 1088 pixels, Vision Pro 1024 by 1024, and Apple TV a landscape 800 by 480, all layered.
• Build iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple Watch icons in Icon Composer, from a background layer and one or more foreground layers.
• On iPhone, iPad and Mac, plan for default, dark, clear and tinted appearances. The system generates any variant you leave out.

The specifications

As of 5 March 2026, the specifications table in Apple's Human Interface Guidelines page App icons reads:

The same page says the system scales your icon to produce the smaller variants used in places such as Settings and notifications, and lists the colour spaces icons support: sRGB for colour, Gray Gamma 2.2 for greyscale, and Display P3 for wide-gamut colour on every platform except visionOS.

If you still use an asset catalog

Not every project has moved to Icon Composer. As of 5 March 2026, Apple's Xcode article Configuring your app icon using an asset catalog says iOS, iPadOS and watchOS apps can generate every icon variation from a single 1024 by 1024 pixel image, which is the default for new projects, while macOS needs an asset for each size and visionOS a single 1024 by 1024 asset. The same article says the iOS App Store icon goes in the iOS 1,024pt image well, and the Mac one in the App Store 2x well. If your project still has a dozen image wells filled in, consider switching to a single size where that is all your icon needs.

Layers, not a flat picture

Apple's guidelines say you can still provide a flattened image, but layers give you the most control. On iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple Watch, an icon is a background layer plus one or more foreground layers, and the system gives them Liquid Glass effects: specular highlights, frostiness and translucency that react to light and, on iPhone and iPad, to the device moving. On Vision Pro an icon has a background and one or two layers on top. On Apple TV, icons use between two and five layers for the parallax effect.

Apple's advice for the layers, as of 5 March 2026:

• Prefer vector artwork (SVG or PDF) for layers you bring into Icon Composer. Use PNG for raster art and mesh gradients, since it is lossless.
• Give foreground shapes clean edges. Soft, feathered edges spoil the system's highlights and shadows.
• Keep the background simple. Icon Composer makes solid colours and gradients, so you rarely need a background image. If you import one, it must be full-bleed and opaque.
• Do not pre-mask. Provide square layers (rectangular on Apple TV) and let the system cut the shape. Pre-rounded corners look jagged and break the highlights.
• Keep the main content centred, especially on Watch and Vision Pro, where the mask is a circle. Apple Design Resources has templates with grids.
• Skip your own shadows, bevels and glows. The system adds its own, and they move; yours are static.

Icon Composer

As of 5 March 2026, Apple's Icon Composer page describes it as the tool for making layered icons with Liquid Glass from a single design for iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple Watch. You import the foreground layers you drew in your usual design tool, set the background, adjust Liquid Glass properties such as highlights, blur, translucency and shadows, preview the result under dynamic lighting, and add the file to your Xcode project. It can also export a flattened version for marketing. A single design is used across platforms by default, and you can adjust it per platform.

Apple TV and Vision Pro icons are different: you add their layers to an image stack in Xcode's asset catalog.

Appearances

On iPhone, iPad and Mac, people can choose default, dark, clear or tinted icons on their Home Screen. Apple's specifications list the appearances as default, dark, clear light, clear dark, tinted light and tinted dark. You can design each, or let the system generate the ones you do not provide. Apple's advice is to keep the core features of the icon the same in every appearance, so people can still find your app when they switch, and to base the dark icon on the light one.

If you offer alternate app icons, the guidelines say each alternate needs its own dark, clear and tinted variants on iPhone and iPad, and that all of them go through App Review.

Design rules that still apply

• Keep it simple. Fine details vanish at small sizes and under system effects.
• Leave text out unless it is essential to your brand. It cannot be localised and is often too small to read.
• Prefer illustration to photos, and do not copy UI components or screenshots into your icon.
• Do not use replicas of Apple hardware.
• On Apple Watch, avoid a black background, which blends into the display.

A checklist before you submit

1. Each platform's layout is the size in the table above, with square (or, for Apple TV, rectangular) unmasked layers.
2. You have looked at the icon in default, dark, clear and tinted, in Icon Composer and on a device.
3. The App Store icon in your build is the final one; it is not uploaded separately.
4. Any alternate icons have their own variants.
5. If you want to compare icon designs on the App Store, Apple's product page optimization page says tests can try different app icons, and that every variant of an alternate icon has to be in the binary of your published app.

The rest of the product page has its own sizes; see our guide to App Store screenshot sizes, and publishing an app on the App Store for the full submission.

How FeedbackKit fits in

FeedbackKit has nothing to do with your icon. It does help with the decision people tend to make on gut feeling: whether to offer alternate icons, a new look, or a dark map style. Those are the changes users have opinions about, so ask them before you spend a week on it.

With FeedbackKit, users post requests and vote on them inside your app, and you can sort requests by the total MRR of the users behind them. If "Alternate app icons" sits at the bottom of the board with three votes while "Offline maps" has hundreds, you have your answer. There are SDKs for SwiftUI on iPhone, iPad and Mac (Swift docs), Jetpack Compose on Android, Flutter and React Native. Here is how collecting requests looks in FeedbackKit, with sample data from a fictional hiking app:

Get the icon right once, then let your users tell you what to build next. Start free.