Customize app icons

The Android for Cars App Library provides a template-based framework that balances a third-party app's brand identity with your unique vehicle design. While Google standardizes the overall structure for safety, you can customize the size, shape, and proportions of app icons to create a cohesive experience.

You can choose whether app icons have rounded corners.

What can you customize?

Iconography in the library is a collaborative effort between the app developer and you, the car maker. App developers provide the base app icons, branding imagery, and custom accent colors (including light and dark variants).

You can customize the specific size, shape, and proportions of these icons to help ensure they fit your hardware and design system.

Here's a look at the different ways you can adjust how icons appear across the system:

1. Global sizing and shapes

You define the exact pixel dimensions for the large and small icons designated by the library. This lets you scale icons to meet your specific touch-target requirements. You can also customize the containers, deciding if icons should appear in circles, squares, or custom shapes to match your car's theming.

2. Media and system icon controls

You can also customize the rendering of specific functional icons:

  • Standard actions: You can customize icons for standard playback actions (like play, pause, or stop) using runtime resource overlays (RROs) targeting the CarMediaCommon library.
  • Content format icons: You must render vector drawables provided by apps, but you can choose to use the large version for main playback views and the small version for secondary views like a minimized bar.
  • App selector button: To use the current media source logo for your system's app selector button, you can set the use_media_source_logo_for_app_selector flag to true.
3. Handling third-party icons in the launcher

When designing an app grid or launcher, you must display the app's icon whenever that app's content is visible so drivers can identify the source. While you cannot change the third-party logo itself, you can customize the background or the tile it sits on to create a unified appearance across your launcher.

Design guidance

To maintain a high-quality driver experience, follow these principles when customizing icons:

  • Visibility: Clearly display the app icon in the app bar, app header, or app selector UI to help ensure users recognize the content source.
  • Contrast: Maintain a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 between icons and their background for legibility.
  • App accent colors: While you can adjust default colors to blend with your interior, consider using an app's provided accent color in progress indicators or buttons to reinforce their brand identity.
  • Touch targets: Verify that all icon-based buttons maintain a minimum touch target size of at least 76 x 76 dp.