How To Remove The Gloss From The iOS App Icon?

Not a big fan of the glossy effect on your iOS app icon? Well, let’s remove it then. The glossiness in the app icons epitomizes the skeuomorphic design that Apple embraced a few years ago. When it first came out, it was all new and exciting. Apple is now moving to a flat design with iOS 7, and besides, some icons just don’t look good with the gloss. As far as removing the glossiness is concerned, there are basically two ways to do this. Well, actually the same thing happens under the hood, one is basically a shortcut for the other. Let’s see how to to do it.  

The short way to do it would be:

• Click on your project name on the top left. You should see the tabs “Summary”, “Info”, “Build Settings” etc.
• Go to “Summary”, scroll down to “App Icons” and make sure the “Prerendered” box is checked.
• You can go and check your app icon. It will not be glossy anymore!

The longer way is as given below. This is what actually happens under the hood:

• Go to YourAppName-info.plist (you can find it under “Supporting Files” in the Navigator Bar)
• Right click on the empty space and select “Add row”
• Scroll down and select “Icon files (iOS 5)”. A row will be added to the list.
• Expand that list by clicking the small triangle to the left of the newly added property i.e “Icon files (iOS 5)”
• In Primary icon, there is a setting called “Icon already includes gloss effects”. Set this to “YES”

And we are done! Go and check your app icon and it should look awesome now.

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