Why so grey, Medium?

The Medium app icon on the App Store is grey. Here is why that could be an error.

Disclaimer: The grey icon may well be intended. This article is based on my own experience with iTunes Connect and black & white icons.

The new medium logo is black. Everywhere. Take a look at the official brand guidelines and the blog post about their new identity. Not a single grey logo. Even the app icon on the home screen is black.

the medium app icon is black. yet on the app store it’s grey.

So why is the app store icon grey? Could this be a mistake?

I think it is. At one picture we had a similar problem. In our case, iTunes Connect rendered certain variants of the app icon grey.

We tried everything: exporting with different color profiles, embedding vs not embedding them, using different tools for exporting. Nothing seemed to work. Then we added different colored numbers to the image assets for debugging and the issue disappeared. We removed the numbers — the issue reappeared. Turns out just a few colorful pixels solve the problem.

Our fix was a small red dot in the corner of the app icon.

before and after the fix. without and with the invisible red dot.

The rounded corners of the app icon hide the red dot so that it’s not visible to the user. Now our app icon is black even in the App Store and on Testflight.

What do you think? Could Medium have the same problem we faced or is the grey icon intended?