Icons are a crucial part of every app and software. They are more than just a visual component; they are the identity of your app. It’s important to represent what your app stands for in the icon. However, this is far from easy, especially when you have to support multiple platforms where each has its own specifications and limitations on what your icon can or cannot have. Since each OS has their own specification for icons, sometimes it’s best to have an specification document you can reference to. And for Android, there used to be a long spec documentation by Google that is now long lost to the depth of the Internet history. Hence, I took the liberty to scribe these lost knowledge with a blog post. (tldr below for those lazy folks)

What is Notification Icon?

When a notification has been issued to a user, it first appears under the status bar.

Notification on status bar. Image Credit: https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/notifiers/notifications

When the user swipes down the status bar, the notification drawer will expand and you can see your notification in this notification drawer.

Notification in notification drawer. Image Credits: https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/notifiers/notifications

The anatomy of notification composes of multiple elements. One of them is the icon on the header area. Label number 1 in the picture below is the notification icon that will be referred to throughout the blog post.

Image Credit: https://material.io/design/platform-guidance/android-notifications.html#anatomy-of-a-notification

With that being said, let’s break down how the notification icon is rendered by the Android OS.

Rendering Android notification icon

In Android, notification icon is hugely different from other icons that you have in your app. Most notably, The icon asset cannot have any color. Android makes a huge change to notification back in Android 5.0 and since then, the Android OS ignores all color channels in your notification icon. Let’s take a look into the following icon:

Sample Icon

What you saw above can be broken down into a combination of two components; an icon with no color and the color. The icon is a colorless static component that is bundled into the app, and the color is a dynamic component which can be changed while the app is running.

Visualizations of two components of Android notification icon

How does Android combine these two?

Firstly, System ignores color channels, for example in ARGB, it ignores RGB channels. Thus the system sees only white color. What it means is that any shapes you want to stand out (such as XY in the above example and the letter f in the Facebook logo) should be transparent so that when the color is added, that distinct shape will be left out.

The color is then filled into the icon by calling the setColor function from the code when we’re creating notification. The function tells the Android OS to populate color channel (e.g RGB in ARGB) in your icon with the color you specified. As an end result, the users see the colored icon on their notification drawer.

Android OS rendering process

Rendering on Status Bar

As for the color on the status bar, it’s rendered by the OS depending on the color of the status bar. Once again, you have no control over this and there is no workaround for it.

Tint color on notification in status bar cannot be changed

This article was originally published on proandroiddev.com on May 03, 2022