Creating and Deploying App Icons

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Having a great-looking application icon is a must-have to increase your chance of success in the application stores. Your app icon represents your app in the application stores as well as on the target platform. This page explains how to configure the icons of your application using RAD Studio.

Default Icons

Some platforms do not allow running applications that do not provide application icons. RAD Studio provides default application icons, so that you can test your application on any platform even if you do not have icons for your application yet. However, before you publish your application you must replace the default RAD Studio icons with custom icons for your application. The following sections explain how to configure your application to use your custom icons.

The table below shows the paths where you can find the RAD Studio default icons, relative to the RAD Studio installation path: C:\Program Files (x86)\Embarcadero\Studio\18.0. If you want all your new projects to use your own icons, replace these default icon files with your own files.

Platform Image Path Notes
Windows DelphiPROJICON.png bin\delphi_PROJECTICON.ico Used for Delphi applications.
CbuilderPROJICON.png bin\cbuilder_PROJECTICON.ico Used for C++Builder applications.
OS X DelphiPROJICON.png bin\delphi_PROJECTICON.icns Used for Delphi applications.
CbuilderPROJICON.png bin\cbuilder_PROJECTICON.icns Used for C++Builder applications.
iOS MobileAppDefaultIcon.png bin\Artwork\iOS\
Android MobileAppDefaultIcon.png bin\Artwork\Android\

Required Icon Sizes

When you deploy your application, you must provide your application icon in different resolutions. The icon resolutions that you need depend on the target platform. Platforms may show your application icon in different contexts, such as an application launcher or a settings window. Depending on the context where your application icon is displayed, a different icon size may be required.

You should design different versions of your icon to support each of the resolutions that each one of your target platforms supports. Using a single icon and resizing your icon to fit each resolution is seldom a good idea. Even vector images require some adjustments on specific resolutions to look good in all resolutions.

The table below shows icon resolutions that the Windows and OS X platforms use. Each value under Icon resolutions in the table stands for the number of pixels per side of an icon. For example, 16 stands for an icon resolution of 16×16 pixels.

For iOS and Android resolutions, check the Application Options page.

Note: Some platforms do not allow running applications that do not provide certain resolutions of application icons.
For example, OS X applications must include 512×512 icons to be accepted in the Apple App Store.
Platform Icon resolutions
16 32 48 128 256 512 1024

Windows

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OS X

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iOS

See icons for iOS apps in Application Options.

Android

See icons for Android apps in Application Options.

Note: An easy way to create multiple resolutions of your icons is to use the MultiResBitmap Editor, available in the IDE.
For more information, see Using Multi-Resolution Bitmaps.

Storing Your Icon Files into an Icon Container

Once you have your app icon in all the resolutions that a target platform requires, for desktop platforms you must then archive the different resolutions of your icon into a single file, an icon container, that you can deploy along with your application.

For Windows, you must create an .ico icon container file. See How to make/get a multi size .ico file?.

For OS X, you must create an .icns icon container file. See Use iconutil to Create an icns File Manually. Alternatively, you can use the RAD Studio ico2icns command-line tool to convert an existing .ico file into an .icns file.

On mobile platforms you do not need to provide an icon container file, you provide your application icons separately instead.

Configuring Your App Icons

Once you have your application icon files, select Project > Options > Application and provide the local paths of your icon files for each target platform. See Application Options for more information.

Note: If you do not specify an .icns file, required for OS X, but you do specify an .ico file, RAD Studio converts your .ico file into an .icns file and uses the resulting .icns file when you deploy your application for OS X.

Troubleshooting

Cannot Add a 1024×1024 Icon into an OS X Icon Container

In order to include an application icon with a resolution of 1024×1024 pixels into an .icns file, you must be running OS X Lion or a later version of OS X. See "create 1024*1024 icns" at StackOverflow for more information.

Cannot Define an App Icon for My Command-Line Application

For command-line applications, setting the application icon is disabled. Platforms which support command-line applications use a standard console-mode icon by default.

To change the icon for your command-line application on Windows platforms, see the following tutorial: Delphi @ About.com: Change the Default Application Icon for a Console Mode Delphi Application.

See Also