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Ios swift – How Are Apps Like WhatsApp Releasing Builds with Dark Mode Icons When Only Xcode 16 Beta 5 is Available?

On iOS 18 (Xcode 16), Apple has introduced app icon asset variants for dark mode and tinted mode. However, currently, only Xcode 16 beta 5 is available, which is not suitable for App Store releases. Recently, I noticed that apps like WhatsApp have released builds with support for dark mode app icons. How is this possible? Am I missing something?

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2

Answers


  1. 0

    You don’t actually need Xcode 16 to update the Contents.json in the Assets folder.

    What they did was to edit the AppIcon asset in Xcode 16 (or with any text editor), and the JSON happened to work when published for a app compiled in Xcode 15. I just verified this myself in the simulator (Xcode 15 build, targeting iOS 18 simulator)

    Example of Contents.json with appearance specified:

    {
  "images" : [
    {
      "filename" : "AppIcon.png",
      "idiom" : "universal",
      "platform" : "ios",
      "size" : "1024x1024"
    },
    {
      "appearances" : [
        {
          "appearance" : "luminosity",
          "value" : "dark"
        }
      ],
      "filename" : "AppIcon-dark.png",
      "idiom" : "universal",
      "platform" : "ios",
      "size" : "1024x1024"
    },
    {
      "appearances" : [
        {
          "appearance" : "luminosity",
          "value" : "tinted"
        }
      ],
      "filename" : "AppIcon-tinted.png",
      "idiom" : "universal",
      "platform" : "ios",
      "size" : "1024x1024"
    }
  ],
  "info" : {
    "author" : "xcode",
    "version" : 1
  }
}
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  2. 0

    I have an app on AppStore that I do not provide any dark mode icon, and yet it shows up as dark mode on my phone running iOS 18 Beta. I have another fellow developer that is similar but his icon doesn’t show up as dark mode. It seems that Apple does some AI magic to convert some icons automatically into dark mode icon.

    So I do not believe apps like "WhatsApp" release builds with dark mode icons.

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