Introduction

So you have started your lovely project in android studio which by default is a hello world project. Then, you proceed with building and running it on either an emulator or an android device like a smart phone. As you check your app out, you find that the launcher icon isn’t your taste or doesn’t match your company branding. So, this tutorial will simply walk you through the steps you take in adding a launcher icon to your Android App.

Step 1: Create a brand icon in your favorite graphics software

Harness the power of graphics software and create a brand icon that meets your design aesthetics and looks. There are two options to pick from; open source or proprietary software.

Under open source software, you have two great options:

• Gimp for raster images
• Inkscape for vector images

Under proprietary software, you can use:

• Adobe photoshop for raster images
• Adobe illustrator for vector images

After creating your icon, store it on your computer hard disk drive, to be referenced later.

Step 2: Open an android studio project and build it

Then, open the android studio project where you are to add the created launcher icon above. If you haven’t created a any project, you can have a quick read through this tutorial or you can also learn how to build your first application.

After opening and building your project, notice that as you launch your app, android studio by default creates a launcher icon for you which is by default the official android brand icon. So this is what we shall change to our created icon above.

Step 3: Add the created icon to your project

i) In android studio, under the project task pane (on the left), you can see two nodes, an app and gradle scripts node. Click on the app node to open the other child nodes of the android file structure.

ii) Under the opened nodes, we see several folders like manifests, java and res and others which may depend on the version of android studio you are using. I am currently using chipmunk version.

iii) Left click the res folder, a popup menu opens up and follow through res > New > Image Asset.

iv) Then, click on Image Asset to open the Asset studio where you configure your launcher icon.

v) Under Source Asset > Path, click the gray folder icon so as to browse the location of the icon you created in your graphics software in step 1 above.

vi) After completing step v) above, your icon should now be seen in the Asset Studio, ready to be made changes on. Now, make any necessary changes. When you are done, click Next to move to the next page of the Asset Studio.

vii) Not so much to do here other than confirming your icon path. So, just click Finish. By default, when you click Finish, android studio will create launcher XML and images files under the drawable and mipmap folders. Both these folders, are located under the res folder. The many icons cater for various device resolutions.

Conclusion