Catching Zebra

Replacement iOS app icons

I found out via Matt Roberts on Twitter that you could change iOS app icons without jailbreaking using an app called iPhone Explorer.

There’s a few apps that have a place on my homescreen, but they have icons I wasn’t so keen on. So I designed some replacements.

iPhone Explorer gives you access to an apps directory structure. Locate the app, then go into the folder called appname.app and in there you’ll find the icon files.

They’re all .png’s and all start with ‘icon’, but you’ll need to find the one that is appropriate to your phone. Plus it’s case sensitive, if you don’t get the exact correct file name, the new icon won’t show up.

For example Twitter’s iPhone 4 icon name is Icon@2x.png with a capital I. And Simplenote’s is icon@2x.png with a lowercase I. icon@2x.png seems to be the convention for iPhone 4 icons as they’re double the size of the old 57x57px icons. But, calvetica didn’t have an @2x file. It simply uses icon.png.

Download

If you have an iPhone 4 you can use the ones I designed for Twitter, calvetica and Simplenote. Just remember to backup the original. And you’ve got to restart your phone for the changes to take effect.