Guides › iOS App Icon Requirements: Every Size You Need
iOS App Icon Requirements: Every Size You Need
From the 20×20 Settings icon to the 1024×1024 App Store artwork — what each iOS icon size is for and how Contents.json ties them together.
iOS icons look deceptively simple from the outside — one icon, one shape, rounded corners the system applies automatically. Underneath, an AppIcon.appiconset actually bundles well over a dozen differently sized images, because the same icon has to look sharp in several very different contexts.
Home screen, Settings, and Spotlight
The icon a user taps to launch the app is only one of the places it appears. iOS also shows a smaller version in Settings, an even smaller one in Spotlight search results, and a notification-badge-sized version in the notification center — each at its own precise pixel dimensions, and each multiplied by the 1x, 2x, and 3x scale factors needed to stay sharp across every physical screen density Apple has shipped.
The App Store icon is its own asset
Separately from every size the icon appears at on the device itself, Apple requires a single 1024×1024 "marketing" icon purely for the App Store listing. It has to be provided without transparency and without rounded corners pre-baked in — Apple's own store front applies the corner mask, so an icon with corners already rounded ends up with a visible double-rounding artifact.
Contents.json ties it all together
Rather than inferring an image's purpose from its dimensions, Xcode reads a Contents.json manifest inside the .appiconset folder that explicitly maps each filename to an idiom (iphone, ipad, ios-marketing) and scale (1x, 2x, 3x). This is why simply dropping correctly-sized PNGs into the folder isn't enough on its own — the manifest has to reference them by the exact filenames it expects, which is the detail most manual icon-replacement mistakes trip over.
Ready to generate your icons? Open FLogo Generator.