iconsur is a command line tool to easily generate macOS Big Sur styled adaptive icons for third-party apps.

The generation is based on the most related iOS app from the App Store, or, if there isn't one, is created from the original icon, in which case the background color and the scaling can be customized.

Installation

Install it easily:

Using homebrew

brew install iconsur

Using npm

npm install -g iconsur

Usage

Download the iconsur binary for macOS x64 from Releases, chmod +x and include it in your PATH.

Start generating your first adaptive app icon:

sudo iconsur set /Applications/Microsoft\ Word.app/

# Update the system icon cache and reload Finder & Dock
sudo iconsur cache

# Then the new icon will appear, and will last until the App is updated next time.

This will search for the App Store and use the most related iOS app. For apps from the Mac App Store, sudo is required to set the alternative icon.

By default, the name for the macOS app is used to search for a corresponding iOS app. You can change the keyword by specifying -k/--keyword.

If your app only has a corresponding iOS app in non-America store, you may like to specify the 2-letter country code with option -r/--region.

sudo iconsur set /Applications/QQMusic.app/ -r cn
sudo iconsur cache

For apps that do not have a corresponding iOS app, an irrelevant app can be found. In these cases, you may need to specify the -l/--local option to forcibly generate an icon locally:

sudo iconsur set /Applications/Visual\ Studio\ Code.app/ -l
sudo iconsur cache

You can also use your own original icon with the -i/--input option. Here IconSur plays the part of adding the background, masking the icon into continuous corners, and adding correct paddings around the masked icon.

sudo iconsur set /Applications/Visual\ Studio\ Code.app/ -l -i /path/to/your/icon
sudo iconsur cache

By default, the original app icon is scaled by 0.9 and is applied to a white background. You may like to change the scaling and background color of the icon. However, if the original icon is opaque, it will not get scaled down in case you specify an original opaque iOS icon from an app developer or a jailbreak icon pack.

sudo iconsur set /Applications/Visual\ Studio\ Code.app/ -l -s 0.8 -c 87cdf0
sudo iconsur cache

To remove the icon previously set for a specific app, use the unset subcommand:

sudo iconsur unset /Applications/Microsoft\ Word.app/
sudo iconsur unset /Applications/Visual\ Studio\ Code.app/
sudo iconsur cache

Example

See my personal iconsur setup as an example.

Credits

Thanks to LiteIcon for the original inspiration, and fileicon by mklement0 for the script for icon customization.