The asset judged fastest

Icon Teardown

Your icon gets designed at 1024 pixels on a white artboard and decided on at about 64, in a row with 10 others. This is that row.

Why the icon and not the screenshots

The screenshots only get looked at by someone who already tapped through. The icon is what decides whether they tap — it is on the search result, the charts, the category page and the home screen, and it is read at a size most icons were never checked at.

Colour families are computed from the actual image pixels, not guessed. Pick an app above.

Does your icon stand out in the search row?

The icon decides whether anyone ever sees the screenshots. This renders yours at the size it appears in an iPhone search result, plus two smaller sizes as a legibility stress test, and measures the dominant colour across the rivals in the same row.

It answers a question a design tool cannot: not "is this a good icon" but "does this icon disappear into the row it will actually be seen in".

How it works

  1. 1Pick an app and a search term. The competing icons come back with the search results.
  2. 2Each icon is drawn into a canvas and its pixels are read back, so the colour breakdown is measured rather than estimated.
  3. 3Hues are grouped into named bins; below a saturation floor a pixel has no useful hue and is counted as light or dark instead.
  4. 4A grayscale toggle strips colour entirely, which is the fastest way to see whether the shape alone still reads.

What it cannot tell you

  • Matching the row’s dominant colour is not automatically a problem, and standing out is not automatically right. Category conventions exist, and an icon that ignores them can read as the wrong kind of app. This page counts what the row does; the judgement is not one a colour histogram can make.
  • If an icon fails to load for analysis it is reported as not analysed rather than guessed at, and it is excluded from the counts.
  • The 48 and 32 pixel renders are a legibility test, not real placements.

Frequently asked questions

What size is an app icon in App Store search results?

Roughly 64 points on an iPhone search result. This page renders at that size, plus smaller ones as a stress test, so you can judge it at the scale it is actually seen.

Should my icon be a different colour from my competitors?

Not necessarily. Category colour conventions help users recognise what kind of app they are looking at. What is useful is knowing what the row looks like before you decide — which is what the breakdown gives you.

Does changing my icon affect ranking?

Apple publishes no such factor. What an icon affects is whether someone taps, which shows up in conversion rate rather than position.