When I ship an app, the part I get stuck on is the icon, not the code.
Writing the code is the part I know how to do. A blank 1024 × 1024 canvas is not.
So I stopped trying to design from nothing and started looking at what real apps do. That turned into a side project: a library of 18,491 real app icons from the App Store and Google Play.
The three bad options
When you need an icon as a solo developer, you usually get to pick one of these:
- Hire a designer. The right call if you have the budget. For a side project that might make $0, I usually don't.
- Draw it yourself. Mine look bad. I've accepted this.
- Ask an image model for "an app icon". You get the glossy, slightly-too-perfect look that everyone now recognizes as AI.
None of these fixed the real problem: I didn't know what a good icon for my kind of app should look like.
What actually helped
The thing that worked was boring: looking at what real apps in my category already do. Put 30 or 40 icons from the same category side by side and two things jump out. The colors that category expects, and the symbols everyone has already used.
Sometimes it's almost funny. In our library, 66% of cleaner app icons use a broom.
Doing this by hand was slow, though. The App Store doesn't let you filter by color or style, and there's no way to see what an icon looked like last year. So I started collecting them.
So I built a library
APPLORE syncs icons from the App Store and Google Play every day. Right now it has 18,491 of them (10,826 from the App Store, 7,665 from Google Play). You can browse by:
- Color, down to the exact shade
- Style: flat, gradient, 3D, glass, mascot, letter
- Category, same as the stores
- First letter, which is surprisingly handy when you're naming your app
What 18,491 icons taught me
Once everything was tagged, I could finally answer questions I used to guess at:
- Half of all app icons have no text at all. If your idea needs a word to make sense, it probably needs a better idea.
- 73% sit on a solid background, and two out of three are flat.
- Light blue is the most common color (17.2% of icons), then red (13.6%), orange (11.8%) and yellow (11.7%).
- The icons that stand out add one thing on top of a simple shape. Icons our team picked as featured are twice as likely to be 3D (12.9% vs 6.3%) and more than twice as likely to use a mascot (19.3% vs 7.5%).
My takeaway: start from what your category already looks like, so people recognize what your app does, then change one thing so it doesn't blend in.
Icons change more than I expected
When an app changes its icon, the old version stays in the library. That turned out to be one of the most fun parts to browse.
Of the 4,812 App Store apps we first recorded in September 2024, 1,464 (30.4%) had a different icon by October 2026. Almost one in three, in two years. Most of them kept the same logo and just changed the material: glossier, more depth, closer to Apple's Liquid Glass look.
The boring technical part
Search was the fun engineering problem. People type things like "a friendly owl for a language app" or search in Chinese, and keyword matching falls apart fast.
What I ended up with:
- Each icon gets a text description (subject, style, colors, mood), and that text is turned into a 768-dimension multilingual embedding, so a Chinese query doesn't need translating first.
- No pgvector. 18,000 vectors are only a few dozen MB, so the server loads them all into memory and does a brute-force dot product. A search takes about a dozen milliseconds.
- The semantic results are merged with plain keyword results using reciprocal rank fusion (each list contributes
1 / (60 + rank)), so exact name matches still win when you search for an app by name.
At this size, a flat array and a loop is simpler than a vector database, and one less thing to run.
From reference to your own icon
Browsing only gets you a direction. The rest of the site is the stuff I kept doing by hand after finding one:
- Generate an icon with AI, using a library icon as the reference, then refine it in plain words ("make it warm orange", "remove the text").
- Preview it on a real home screen, next to system apps, in light, dark and tinted mode.
- Export every size iOS, Android and the web need in one zip.
Browsing is free with limits (the first 300 icons in each list, 5 downloads and 5 AI searches a day). New accounts get 50 credits, which is about 10 generated icons.
What I'd love feedback on
The part I'm least sure about is browsing by color. I use it all the time, but I can't tell if it actually helps people design an icon, or if it's just nice to look at.
So two things:
- Do you browse by color when you design, or is it just pretty?
- Drop your app's icon in the comments. I'll reply to each one and tell you which patterns from the data it follows and how it holds up at home-screen size. If you want to try making one, I'll add a code for 50 free credits (about 10 AI icons).
Thanks for reading. If you're stuck on an icon right now, start here.
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