Changing your iOS App Icon programatically

When iOS 10.3 was released, Apple opened up an API to allow developers to change the app icon for their app programatically. Of course this doesn’t mean you can change it every second like the Clock app, or even every day like the Calendar app. What you can do is change the app icon when the app is running in the foreground, and it will notify the user with a pretty ugly system alert dialog that the icon is changing. This post will walk through the configuration and API calls to allow an app to change the app icon.

The first step is to obtain your app icon image assets. These must be .png files and you will need 2x and 3x resolutions. An important thing to consider is that you want all the proper icon sizes available so that when the icon changes it is consistent across settings, spotlight, notifications, etc.

Unfortunately, these cannot be placed in a xcassets file, however, they must be packaged in the main bundle. The source code for this post can be found here.

The next step is to configure the Info.plist file. Review the documentation for the plist file carefully. In the provided code, the plist file contains the CFBundleIcons dictionary configured as show below:

In the CFBundleAlternateIcons dictionary, the key represents the string that will be used when making the API call to change the app icon. You will see these used in the code samples later in this post. The value is an array of CFBundleIconFiles. In our case, its an array of one item, with the relative path to the filename (without extension and size modifier). If you like to keep your files organized in both Xcode and the filesystem like me, you’ll want to store your icons in a sub folder within your project, so it’s important to specify the relative path, otherwise you’ll get a runtime error when trying to change icons.

Now on to the code. The API docs can be found here. The APIs are pretty basic. Ideally you want to check if the app can change the app icon with something like the following:

if UIApplication.shared.supportsAlternateIcons {
    print("I can do it")
}

Then to change the icon, do something like this:

//note that the name corresponds to the key in the Info.plist
//  CFBundleAlternateIcons dictionary
UIApplication.shared.setAlternateIconName("hockey") { (error: Error?) in
    guard let error = error else {
        print("success")
        return
    }
    print("switching icon to hockey encountered and error: \(error)")
}

Finally, to reset the icon back to the primary one by setting the name to nil:

UIApplication.shared.setAlternateIconName(nil) { (error: Error?) in
    guard let error = error else {
        print("success")
        return
    }
    print("switching icon to primary encountered and error: \(error)")
}

Simple as that. Check out the sample app and switch icons between your favorite Philadelphia sports teams 😃