How to change app icons on iPhone with the Shortcuts app
iOS has no setting to swap one app's icon for a picture of your own. The usual way around it is the built-in Shortcuts app: you make a shortcut that opens the app, give that shortcut your own image, put it on the home screen and hide the original icon. This page walks through it, with the snags people hit. It is free and needs no sign-up.
Before you start
- You need the icon images on the phone, as PNG or JPG, in Photos or in the Files app. Square images work best: iOS rounds the corners itself.
- If your icons come in a zip, open the Files app, find the zip and tap it once: Files unpacks it into a folder next to it.
- Plan about one minute per icon. Doing 10 to 20 of your most used apps is a common place to stop.
Step by step
- Open the Shortcuts app and tap + to make a new shortcut.
- Tap Add Action, search for Open App and pick it.
- Tap the word App in the action and choose the app this icon will open.
- Tap the share button (or the name at the top, depending on the iOS version) and choose Add to Home Screen.
- Tap the small icon next to the name, then Choose Photo or Choose File, and pick your image.
- Type the name you want under the icon (it can be short, or the app's own name) and tap Add.
- Go back to the home screen, long-press the original app icon, choose Remove App, then Remove from Home Screen. The app is not deleted: it stays in the App Library and keeps its data.
Menu names move a little between iOS versions; the steps stay the same. On some iOS versions a short banner shows for a moment when you open an app through a shortcut.
Common snags
| What happens | Why, and what to do |
|---|---|
| Notification badges (the red numbers) are gone | Badges belong to the real app icon, not to a shortcut. Keep the original icon on a page you rarely open, or in a folder, if you need its badges. |
| The image looks blurry | The picture was too small. Use images of at least 180 x 180 px; 512 x 512 px is plenty. |
| The icon has a white or black box around it | The image is not square, or has a border. Use a square image with the colour going to the edges. |
| The shortcut opens the wrong app | Open the shortcut in the Shortcuts app and change the app in the Open App action. |
| Long-press shows Edit Home Screen, not Remove App | You pressed a shortcut, not the original. The original is the one with the app's own logo. |
A matching wallpaper
- Save the wallpaper image to Photos.
- Open Settings, then Wallpaper, then Add New Wallpaper, and choose Photos.
- Pick the image, set it, and choose to use it for the home screen as well as the lock screen.
Icons that share one colour and one line weight with the wallpaper are what makes a home screen look planned rather than mixed.
Without custom images
Recent iOS versions also let you switch all icons to a dark or tinted look from the home screen's edit menu. That changes the colour of the existing logos; it does not replace them with your own design. The Shortcuts method above is the one that does.
Want a set of icons to use with this guide?
Line Icons for iPhone: 66 App Icons x 4 Colourways + 4 Wallpapers costs $9 and is sold through Gumroad. Each colourway (Graphite, Paper, Sage, Midnight) has 66 square 512 x 512 px PNG icons with one simple line glyph each, named by what an app does (chat, cart, music, bank and so on), plus one matching 1290 x 2796 px wallpaper. The licence is for use on your own devices; no resale.
This guide is free. The icon pack is our own paid product, and this page links to it because we sell it. The icons and wallpapers were drawn by a script written by an AI agent, not by a human designer, and a second script checked the files (format, size, a glyph on every tile, no two alike). Nobody looked at them on a phone before release.