12 Comments

Changing App Icons on the iPhone Without Jailbreaking

September 22, 2010 by in Apple with 12 Comments

Funny, I was looking at my phone yesterday and saying how much I love certain apps, but hate their icons. Thanks to a special utility (that doesn’t require you to jailbreak your phone) you can actually change an iOS apps icon. This tip was only tested on an iPhone 4, so I can’t verify that it would work on a 3GS or 3G – but I’m sure that somebody can check it out for me.

First you need to install iPhone Explorer (It’s a free program for both Mac and PC). Then plug your phone into your computer and launch the app.

Before you replace the icon its important to know the replacement icon you want to use must be 114 x 114, PNG, No Transparency, No Layers, 72 PPI.

As an example I’m going to change the icon of the UNEASYsilence app.

  1. Navigate to “(name of your phone)/Apps/UNEASYapp/UNEASYapp.app”
  2. Rename the file in there “icon@2x.png” to “icon@2x_Old.png”
  3. Name the icon you want to replace the original with “icon@2x.png” (yes it is case sensitive)
  4. Now simply drag this icon into the UNEASYapp.app folder and reboot your phone.

When you reboot your phone you will see a brand new beveled shiny icon for the app you just worked with.

Now, I would imagine you could replace the icon.png with a 57 x 57, PNG file to change an icon on a iPhone 3 or 3GS – but I have no way of testing that.


  • Theo

    query: does the icon stay after the app is updated?
    and thank you for giving the dimensions, and ask how you gained that information exactly?

  • http://www.andrewbachman.net/ Andrew

    Beautiful, now I can finally change that god awful Twitter icon with the simple yet elegant Tweetie 2 icon that I miss so much. Great find and ho- to!

  • Stephen

    Does anyone have any good sites for iPhone icons?

  • Robert

    Is there any way to change the application title?

  • Frank

    First thing I did was to replace some png files with transparent ones in the “Michelle” app. Guess what happens? N a k e d ! :-)

  • Jason

    But you can’t change the icons of things like Safari, Mail, Camera etc..

    Any way to do this without jailbreaking?

  • Anon

    Frank… if you spend a little less time figuring out how to get a virtual girl naked, you may actually get to see a *real* one naked. ;)

  • Frank

    @Anon: I’m happily married and we love our five boys. :-)))

    This make-Michelle-naked-thing is interesting, because there is no nudity allowed in the AppStore. With the iPhone Explorer it is possible to get around this restriction.

    In the end is just fun and interesting to see, of course. The “Look what I can do” effect. :-)

  • katrin81

    Funny, I was looking at my phone yesterday and saying how much I love certain apps, but hate their icons. Thanks to a special utility (that doesn

  • Aaron

    Cheers for this. Worked perfect… but when renaming, i had to use a capital I for “icon@2x.png”

  • Barto

    Is there a specific way to save out your PNG files? It’s not working for me in iOS 5.0.1 and 4S…
    Thanks!

  • Ferit1213

    Thank you!

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