Tutorials

This is just a small follow-up post to The easiest way to create nice icons for Android apps.

Say, if you follow that guide, and have made an icon to represent your app, how do you use it?

If you have one icon image, or three icon images (one for each screen density, ldpi, mdpi and hdpi, like in the guide), you put your icon files in the res/drawable folder where they belong.

Depending on what API level you are creating your Android application for, in your “res” folder you either have one folder called “drawable” or three folders called “drawable-ldpi”, “drawable-mdpi” and “drawable-hdpi”.

For application launcher icons, the sizes are:

• Low density – ldpi – 36×36 px
• Medium density – mdpi – 48×48 px
• High density – hdpi – 72×72 px

When you have put your icon in the folder/folders, open up your AndroidManifest.xml file and choose to view it as XML.

For a new Android application, the AndroidManifest.xml file will look like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<manifest xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
      package="test.application"
      android:versionCode="1"
      android:versionName="1.0">
    <application android:icon="@drawable/icon" android:label="@string/app_name">
        <activity android:name=".YourAppName"
                  android:label="@string/app_name">
            <intent-filter>
                <action android:name="android.intent.action.MAIN" />
                <category android:name="android.intent.category.LAUNCHER" />
            </intent-filter>
        </activity>
    </application>
</manifest>

And on line 6 you can see the attribute that specifies your applications icon:

android:icon="@drawable/icon"

The /icon refers to the default icon.png file in your drawable folder (or the drawable-ldpi/mdpi/hdpi folders).

If substitute “icon” with the name of your icon file, you will change the icon of your app.