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How to change app icons on Android
Customize your Android phone's home screen by changing the app icons
Changing your app icons on Android is easy, but it isn't intuitive. You'll usually delve into third-party apps and launchers to maximize your Android phone's potential for customization. We show you how to change your app icons on every Android device. These steps also work on all the top Android tablets, so if you own a phone and tablet from two manufacturers, you can make them look the same. Tidy up your apps after customizing your icons to make your phone look stylish and organized.
Meet my Android screen of shame, where all my non-themed app icons live
There's no place for ugly apps on a well-curated homescreen
Material You has been around for a few years now, and with Android 14 right around the corner, it's easy to take this fantastic feature for granted. However, despite the improvements made in Android 13, I am still resigned to sending apps to my screen of shame two years after the feature debuted. It's a problem I expect to persist on everything from Pixel phones to budget Android tablets.
Android 13 DP1 opens up dynamic icon theming to third-party apps
Just be ready for a big mix of themed and un-themed icons
Google has confirmed that Material You is set to grow beyond the bounds of the Pixel family, but that doesn’t mean it’s done evolving and growing in new ways. An experiment in Android 12 Beta 3 expands the reach of the dynamic theming system to home screen icons, but only for Google's own apps. Now with Android 13, third-party apps are free to create their own theming-friendly icons so you can have the two-tone icon packs you’ve always wanted without installing a custom launcher.
Google Chrome adopts a new icon design for the first time in eight years
Trust us, it's changed. We think?
Google Chrome has been around for years, but when the first beta version was released for Windows back in 2008, the browser had a very different-looking icon than it does today. While the iconic Chrome orb has kept the same basic design elements and colors, its look has progressively gotten flatter over the years — first in 2011 and later in 2014. Now Chrome continues that trend with its first logo tweak in 8 years, and while the changes might look pretty subtle, these are all about making the icon more flexible and adaptable across platforms and their respective design languages.
Google extends Material You's dynamic app icon themes to more of its apps in Android 12 Beta 3
Third-party apps next, please?
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Android 12 Beta 2 first introduced monochrome icons for Google apps based on your wallpaper's colors, much like other interface elements as part of Material You or Monet. Beta 3 expands on these capabilities. It's the first release of Android 12 that introduces a user-facing toggle to turn on or off these themed icons in the Wallpaper & style app, and while it's at it, it's adding a ton more Google apps to the list of supported icons.
Android diehards love their customization, and Android 12 seems poised to introduce several new system-level ways to make your phone uniquely yours. One such (minor) way: the Pixel Launcher supports a grid size of four by five icons in the first developer preview, a previously unavailable option.
Google's new icons for Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Docs, and Meet all look the same
Thanks for making them so easily distinguishable, Googz
As part of its announcement of G Suite's rebranding to Google Workspace, Google introduced a new visual identity and five redesigned icons for some of its popular services: Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Docs, and Meet. The icons, as you can see them above, are similar to what we've come to expect from Google — and perhaps a little too similar at that.
As time has passed, we've seen Google slowly become more serious about a cohesive design language when it comes to Android, Chrome OS, and the Play Store. Taking one more step along that road, the company put out new app icon guidelines for app developers. This is meant to ensure uniformity in the Play Store and it will hopefully make it easier for you the user to have adaptive icons in your app drawer.