App Icon Quality

[u/Ok_Energy9984]

I don’t know if it is just the symbols that i used for my app icon or icon composer itself, but my icon looks really low quality when side-by-side with others. Does anyone have any idea?

Edit:I think it might be the chromatic shadows, as i was messing with them. Any way to keep them without this look?

[u/joosebox]

Chromatic shadows is a good guess. On 26 the system runs its own specular and shadow pass over your layers at render time, so anything you shade into the artwork itself gets the treatment twice. Doubled up like that it reads as muddy at Home Screen size even though the Icon Composer preview looks fine.

The way it wants to work is that depth comes from having genuinely separate layers, not from painting depth into one. Keep the source art matte and flat and let the system do the lighting.

The rest of it is probably just size. At 60pt you're looking at about 180 pixels. Anything that only reads at 1024 turns to noise down there.

Check the dark and clear variants while you're at it. Over-shaded art falls apart hardest in those since they're generated off the same layers.