Android Notification Icon Assets

Android shows a small icon in the status bar and at the top of each notification. Setting it up has two parts: declaring the icon and tint-color resources, then generating the white-and-transparent icon assets that Android 5 and above require.

Declare Your Notification Icon Resources

To specify the icon displayed in the system tray, and at the top of the notification, declare these resources in teak.xml.

You will need two versions of the file: one in res/values/ and the other in res/values-v21/.

res/values/teak.xml and res/values-v21/teak.xml
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<resources>
  <!-- The tint color for your silhouette icon, format is: 0xAARRGGBB -->
  <integer name="io_teak_notification_accent_color">0xfff15a29</integer>

  <!-- Icons should be white and transparent, and processed with Android Asset Studio -->
  <drawable name="io_teak_small_notification_icon">@drawable/YOUR_ICON_FILE_NAME</drawable>
</resources>

The file in values should point to a full-color icon, for devices running older than Android 5. The file in values-v21 should point to a white and transparent PNG for Android 5 and above.

Replace YOUR_ICON_FILE_NAME with the name of your icon drawable (for example, icon_white in the steps below).

Generate the Icon Assets

To make sure that your notification icons show up properly on API 21+ you should use Android Asset Studio to process, and create the needed resolutions for the icon.

Click on the Notification icon generator tool, and you will see this screen:

android asset studio

Drag your notification icon onto the page, and set the name (bottom left) to the value you use for io_teak_small_notification_icon, then click on the Download Zip button in the top right corner.

For this example the name of the icon is icon_white

The zip file should contain:

  • drawable-mdpi/icon_white.png

  • drawable-hdpi/icon_white.png

  • drawable-xhdpi/icon_white.png

  • drawable-xxhdpi/icon_white.png

  • drawable-xxxhdpi/icon_white.png

Copy all of these directories into your res/ directory. Your Android app should now have:

  • res/drawable-mdpi/icon_white.png

  • res/drawable-hdpi/icon_white.png

  • res/drawable-xhdpi/icon_white.png

  • res/drawable-xxhdpi/icon_white.png

  • res/drawable-xxxhdpi/icon_white.png

This notification icon would be specified in res/values-v21/teak.xml as:

res/values-v21/teak.xml
<drawable name="io_teak_small_notification_icon">@drawable/icon_white</drawable>