The ability to change your app’s icon programmatically has been around for quite a few years. Specifically, this feature was released in iOS 10.3, and it allows developers to switch between a predefined set of alternate icons.

Dynamic icons are useful when your application is based on subscriptions. Tinder is one application that uses this feature beautifully as it gives Tinder Gold members an option to switch the icon.

Our goals

In this piece, we’ll be showing you how to change your app icons programmatically using SwiftUI

We’ll leverage SwiftUI Pickers to allow the user to choose their favorite icon from a menu list.

Finally, we’ll address a serious pitfall. Pickers and NavigationView don’t get along the way we want them to currently — and we’ll see why.

Setting Alternate App Icons Programmatically

The code for setting alternate icons isn’t that big. It’s hardly a line. It’s the setup that takes a little bit of time.

Get the alternate app icon

The below line of code returns an optional string that represents the current app icon’s key name. If the default app icon is being used, it returns nil:

UIApplication.shared.alternateIconName

Set alternate icon

To set an alternate icon, just pass the name of the icon in the below function. Handling the completion handler to check for errors is a good practice.

UIApplication.shared.setAlternateIconName(iconName, completionHandler: {error in})

But where do we set the icon name? We’ll come back to this in a bit.

The following are the rules you need to follow when using alternate icons in your application:

1. Don’t add alternate icons in the assets catalog

It’s crucial you create a separate group that holds all your alternate icons (including the 2x and 3x files).

2. Handle the Info.plist file carefully

The Info.plist file is where you need to set up your dictionary for alternate icons (and primary icons, too). Since the dictionary is nested, I find editing the Info.plist in the raw XML format much easier than those buttons.

The following snippet shows the dictionary structure for the CFBundleIcons key. Add this at the top level of the XML dictionary that you see.

<key>CFBundleIcons</key> <dict> <key>CFBundlePrimaryIcon</key> <dict> <key>CFBundleIconFiles</key> <array> <string>AppIcon</string> </array> <key>UIPrerenderedIcon</key> <false/> </dict> <key>CFBundleAlternateIcons</key> <dict> <key>IconCodeName</key> <dict> <key>CFBundleIconFiles</key> <array> <string>IconFileName</string> </array> <key>UIPrerenderedIcon</key> <false/> </dict> </dict> </dict>

It might look a bit scary at first, but it’s pretty straightforward. CFBundleIcons holds two dictionaries:

CFBundlePrimaryIcon for the primary icon that resides in your asset catalog

for the primary icon that resides in your asset catalog CFBundleAlternateIcons is used to hold the alternate icons. The keys inside the CFBundleAlternateIcons represents the name you’ll use in the code. The name goes in place of the iconName we saw earlier.

is used to hold the alternate icons. The keys inside the represents the name you’ll use in the code. The name goes in place of the we saw earlier. Inside CFBundleIconFiles , we pass the icon filenames — without extensions and without the 2x and 3x variants. Just the names.

, we pass the icon filenames — without extensions and without the 2x and 3x variants. Just the names. UIPrerenderedIcon is a boolean key that indicates the gloss effect. Set this to false to let the system add the shine effect on your icon.

Project Structure

Now that we’re all set, let’s look at the project structure. We’ve added three types of icons in an Icons group folder in our app’s target.

Decoding the Alternate-Icons Dictionary

The idea is to get the key names of all the alternate icons and to set them in an array. The following function does just that by decoding the Info.plist .

func getAlternateIconNames(){ if let icons = Bundle.main.object(forInfoDictionaryKey: "CFBundleIcons") as? [String: Any], let alternateIcons = icons["CFBundleAlternateIcons"] as? [String: Any] { for (_, value) in alternateIcons{ guard let iconList = value as? Dictionary else{return} guard let iconFiles = iconList["CFBundleIconFiles"] as? [String] else{return} guard let icon = iconFiles.first else{return} iconNames.append(icon) } } }

iconNames is the array of strings that are defined in the ObservableObject class below with the getAlternateIconNames function called in the init method:

class IconNames: ObservableObject { var iconNames: [String?] = [nil] @Published var currentIndex = 0 init() { getAlternateIconNames() if let currentIcon = UIApplication.shared.alternateIconName{ self.currentIndex = iconNames.firstIndex(of: currentIcon) ?? 0 } }

In the above code, the first element of the iconNames array is set as nil as an indicator of the primary app icon.

The active icon’s index is set as a @Published property wrapper. It’s initialized with the currently active icon.

We’ll share the above data model with our SwiftUI ContentViews through @EnvironmentObject , which is passed to the view hierarchy from the SceneDelegate .

window.rootViewController = UIHostingController(rootView: contentView.environmentObject(IconNames()))

Setting Up Our SwiftUI Picker in Our ContentView

In the following code, we’re populating our SwiftUI Picker with the icon names from the EnvironmentObject property-wrapper instance:

import SwiftUI struct ContentView: View { @EnvironmentObject var iconSettings : IconNames var body: some View { NavigationView { Form { Section{ Picker(selection: $iconSettings.currentIndex, label: Text("Icons")) { ForEach(0..<iconSettings.iconNames.count) { Text(self.iconSettings.iconNames[$0] ?? "Default") } }.onReceive([self.iconSettings.currentIndex].publisher.first()) { (value) in let index = self.iconSettings.iconNames.firstIndex(of: UIApplication.shared.alternateIconName) ?? 0 if index != value{ UIApplication.shared.setAlternateIconName(self.iconSettings.iconNames[value]){ error in if let error = error { print(error.localizedDescription) } else { print("Success!") } } } } } } .navigationBarTitle("AlternateIcons", displayMode: .inline) } } }

Whenever the Picker’s selection is changed, the onReceive modifier gets triggered. It publishes the latest value it got, (index of the selected icon).

modifier gets triggered. It publishes the latest value it got, (index of the selected icon). Inside the closure, we’re comparing the icon name of the new selection with the currently active app icon’s name. This is a crucial step since it triggers an icon change only when the user chooses a different one.

Here’s a look at our application in action:

As we can see above, when the alternate icon is changed successfully, the system sends an alert. Hence, it’s important to call the setAlternateIconName from the main thread once the view is set.

Now, let’s look at how to set the alternate icons in the SwiftUI view and also address an issue when Pickers and the NavigationView operate together.

SwiftUI Picker and NavigationView Pitfall

While the above SwiftUI application does a fine job in managing the state, there are a few pitfalls when using NavigationView with Pickers. Not handling those cases carefully can haunt you later.

Pitfall 1

The following screengrab adds the alternate icons into a SwiftUI image under Pickers, and they get masked due to the NavigationView:

Now we have can address the overlay issue by setting a button style on the NavigationView. But then, we lose our SwiftUI Picker selection indicator:

Remedy

Set renderingMode as original on the Image

By setting the renderingMode to original, the overlay is hidden, the picker selection is visible and we don’t need to set a buttonStyle for the NavigationView .

So we finally got our application working with alternate icons displayed in a SwiftUI Picker.

Pitfall 2

Also, there’s another case where SwiftUI Pickers and the NavigationView don’t work well as intended currently. Setting the NavigationView’s style to automatic or large would cause the Picker to reposition once during the navigation thereby showing a jitter.

Remedy

Currently, the only workaround for this is by setting the NavigationView’s displayMode as inline. For more details, refer to this Stack Overflow post.

That brings an end to this tutorial. You can download the full source code from Github Repository.