How to Make an iOS App Icon (1024×1024, No Transparency — Here's Why)

If you've ever dragged a logo into Xcode and had it rejected, you're not alone — App Store icons have a surprisingly strict, surprisingly specific set of requirements, and almost none of them are obvious from just looking at the artwork itself.

What Apple actually requires

• Exactly 1024×1024 pixels. Not 1023, not 1025 — Xcode validates this exactly. Since Xcode 14, a single 1024×1024 image is enough; the system generates every smaller size (the home screen, Settings, Spotlight, notifications) from it automatically.
• Square. No exceptions — a rectangular or cropped-oddly logo has to be fit into a square canvas somehow before it's usable.
• PNG format. Not JPG, not a PDF export straight from a design tool.
• No transparency. This is the one that catches people most often — see below.

Why "no transparency" trips people up

Most logos are designed with a transparent background on purpose — that's what makes them reusable on any color backdrop. But Apple's validation checks every pixel in the icon, and if even one has partial transparency, App Store Connect rejects it. The fix isn't to remove the alpha channel as a file property — it's to actually fill the transparent area with a real, opaque background color before exporting. A logo that looks fine in your design tool can still fail here, because most design tools happily export transparency without warning you it won't pass.

Turning a logo into an app icon

The actual problem is almost always the same: you have a logo that's the wrong shape, possibly with a transparent background, and you need something that's exactly 1024×1024, square, and fully opaque — without distorting or squashing the logo to force it into that shape.

Our Image Crop Tool has a built-in Apple App Icon preset that handles this directly: upload your logo, and you get a square selection box you can drag and resize by its corners to frame exactly the part of the logo you want — the rest is trimmed, not squashed, so your logo never gets stretched out of proportion. Pick a background color to fill in behind it (this is what actually satisfies the "no transparency" rule), and the tool exports a real 1024×1024 PNG, generated entirely in your browser.

A quick pre-flight checklist

• Is it exactly 1024×1024? (Not close — exact.)
• Is it a PNG?
• Does it have a solid background all the way to the edges, with nothing transparent peeking through?
• Is the logo itself undistorted — not stretched or squished?

If you can check all four, Xcode should accept it without a fight.