Crappy icon resolution, even on new iOS 4 apps

[joephish]

Hey guys,

I have a nice new iPhone 4 (love it!), and when I restored all my old apps I noticed that all my 3rd party app icons were half resolution, which makes sense. Slowly, the developers appear to be updating their apps for iOS4 and giving them high resolution icons.

HOWEVER, many of my apps which are being updated for iOS4 aren't getting high resolution icons. I don't understand why developers aren't doing this?! One of them is the music app Spotify, which now has beautiful integration with the music multitasking capability, and yet still has a crap icon.

I developed an app for iPhone myself once, and Apple requires that you submit a very high res icon (512x512?) as part of the submission process. So all developers must have the artwork available... why isn't it being used?! Or is there a bug on my iPhone that it's caching an old version of the icon?

Anyone else seeing this? Thanks

 

[robbieduncan]

If the developer is a bit lazy they may not bother re-scaling the icon. I also found that simply including an Icon@2x.png (assuming the normal one is Icon.png) made no difference: I had to make Info.plist changes to include both icons in the array of icons. The key for that was only added in iOS 3.2 so pure iPhone developers may be unaware of this...

 

[joephish]

Interesting. Thanks!

I sort of wish the app icon was disassociated with the app itself so that Apple could've automatically updated every single app in the store automatically. Ah well.

 

[ianray]

I had to make Info.plist changes to include both icons in the array of icons.

I figured this out last night, too. FWIW Apple's documentation was not very clear...

Also the icons can be named anything as it seems iOS checks the image metadata when selecting an icon.

 

[JayLenochiniMac]

Apple hasn't even updated a couple of their own apps, namely iDisk and Remote.

I actually emailed Sigalert requesting that they update their webclip icon to a high resolution one and they wrote back saying my eyes must be better than theirs and they can hardly see a difference , but that they would be redesigning the icon anyway and will make sure they get a high-res version at that time.

 

[grmatt]

Apple hasn't even updated a couple of their own apps, namely iDisk and Remote.

I actually emailed Sigalert requesting that they update their webclip icon to a high resolution one and they wrote back saying my eyes must be better than theirs and they can hardly see a difference , but that they would be redesigning the icon anyway and will make sure they get a high-res version at that time.

Yeah, that's dumb. I just updated one and it made a huge difference. I wonder if they're even looking at an iPhone 4.