Unity: Stretched App Icon on iOS Builds

We recently starting making and testing iOS builds of our space-shooter game on an iPhone. We noticed right away that the app icon for our game looked very different than than on platforms like PC and Android, which have the desired app icon. The app icon image for iOS looked stretched out.

I began researching why this was occuring, but I wasn’t really sure what to search for. I tried using search terms that included stretched, app icon, ios, and unity, but didn’t have any luck finding what may have been the cause. I tried using different sized images (mostly larger) to see if we had a wrong sized image for iOS (we didn’t).

I eventually went a different route and look directly at Apple’s docs. What I found in the Apple docs for iOS app icon was this: “Keep the background simple and avoid transparency.” It doesn’t say that transparency isn’t allowed or won’t work in app icons, but it seemed like something worth trying.

I remade our app icon image, replacing the transparent background with a white background. This fixed the problem. I don’t know if there is some way to get transparency to work for an iOS app icon or if their documentation should use stronger language to indicate to not use transparency at all, but this provided a simple enough solution.