NEW EXPERIENCES IN 6 SHORT STEPS

Users can customize iOS App Icons after downloading their Xamarin app

Programmatically change iOS Xamarin app icon dynamically

3 min readDec 8, 2020

At December’s Xamarin Community Standup, the Senior Microsoft Xamarin PM David Ortinau, talked about how the official GitHub app impressed him because it allowed him to update the app icon ‘after’ installing the app. He also mentioned that it is a possibility to do with Xamarin, but there isn’t a Xamarin article about it. I was curious to see how to do it and realized it’s really simple. You can also hop straight to the code sample on my GitHub.

Getting Started

Since it’s the simplest and most versatile, I will use a Blank Xamarin Forms App template from Visual Studio for this sample. We will access the Native iOS API’s using Dependency Services, as detailed by Microsoft Xamarin here.

Core Project: First, we will start by creating an IIconSwitchService interface that contains the contract that will be used to communicate between the Xamarin.Forms code and Native iOS UI:

public interface IIconSwitchService{
    Task SwitchAppIcon(string iconName);
}

Then, we add two buttons in the XAML code of our page as shown below:

<Button Text="Switch Icon to Maui" Clicked="Maui_Button_Clicked"/>
<Button Text="Switch Icon to Xamarin" Clicked="Xam_Button_Clicked"/>

Finally, add the the event handlers for the buttons in the code behind. Passing the MauiLogo as a string converts the icon to the alternate icon, and passing null reverts to the default App Icon:

async void Maui_Button_Clicked(Object sender, EventArgs e){
    var iconSwitcher = DependencyService.Get<IIconSwitchService>();
    await iconSwitcher.SwitchAppIcon("MauiLogo");
}
async void Xam_Button_Clicked(Object sender, EventArgs e){
    var iconSwitcher = DependencyService.Get<IIconSwitchService>();
    await iconSwitcher.SwitchAppIcon(null);
}

IOS Project: We are going to add an alternate “MauiLogo” alongside the default Xamagon logo. So, first we add two logos to the iOS Resources folder: maui-logo@2x.png(120x120) & maui-logo@3x.png(180x180).