Creating iOS App Icons [FruitoMarathon: Day 2 – Plum]

Circles is a great puzzle. But I’d like to continue “FruitoMarathon” in honor of my another recent app fruHarvest. The second fruit there is a plum. And today I’d like to talk about app icons in iOS7.

The icons in iOS7 differs from icons in iOS6 in shape (see a comprehensive discussion here), in size and the absence of the gloss. Before I prepared only 7 icon files, now I need 13 files:

– Icon.png – 57×57 (iOS6 iPhone)
– Icon@2x.png – 114×114 (iOS6 iPhone Retina)
– Icon-72.png – 72×72 (iOS6 iPad)
– Icon-72@2x.png – 144×144 (iOS6 iPad Retina)

– Icon-60@2x.png – 120×120 (iOS7 iPhone Retina)
– Icon-76.png – 76×76 (iOS7 iPad)
– Icon-76@2x.png – 152×152 (iOS7 iPad Retina)

– Icon-Small-50.png – 50×50 (Spotlight iOS6 iPad)
– Icon-Small-50@2x.png – 100×100 (Spotlight iOS6 iPad Retina)
– Icon-Small.png – 29×29 (Spotlight iOS6 iPhone Settings iPhone + iPad)
– Icon-Small@2x.png – 58×58 (Spotlight iOS 6 iPhone Retina Settings iPhone + iPad Retina)

– Icon-40.png – 40×40 (Spotlight iOS7 iPad)
– Icon-40@2x.png – 80×80 (Spotlight iOS7 iPhone Retina + iPad Retina)

Icon-60.png would be an icon for non-Retina iPhone with iOS7, but there are no such devices.

Should I support iOS6? Flurry Analytics shows that iOS6 is still popular, and I have friends who are reluctant to update to iOS7. (My apps are opened even on devices with iOS5.) Statistics of sessions for Circles:
iOS7 – 79.9%;
iOS6 – 18.8%;
iOS5 – 1.3%.

Now I use MakeAppIcon website for generating a set of icons of all necessary sizes. Just feed a 1024×1024 image to their toaster and wait for an e-mail with icons.

Specific names of files are not very important in Xcode 5, but I use the recommended names showed above. I always check Targets > General and the Info.plist file that all 13 icon files with correct names are uploaded and recognized by Xcode.