Your app icon sits in a white circle on Android

Why Android refuses to crop your icon

Android launchers apply an adaptive shape — circle, squircle, rounded square, depending on the device and launcher. To crop safely, the system needs to know your artwork tolerates having its edges cut. purpose: "maskable" is that declaration.

Without it, Chrome assumes cropping would destroy your logo, so it takes the safe route: it shrinks your icon and puts it on a white background inside the shape. Nothing is broken, no warning appears, and the result looks like an amateur port of a real app.

This is not rare. Reading the manifests of 386 apps in this directory on 12 August 2026, 215 of the 373 readable ones declared no maskable icon — 58%, and it is not the only defect at that scale. Over half of the installable web apps we track look slightly wrong on the home screen, and their authors mostly do not know.

The fix, and the padding that matters

Add a 512×512 PNG where the artwork occupies the centre and roughly 20% of each edge is empty. That margin is the safe zone: the launcher may crop into it, and anything you put there can disappear. A logo drawn edge to edge will lose its corners on a circular launcher.

Declare it alongside what you already have rather than replacing it. Keep your existing purpose: "any" icons — they are used for other surfaces such as the task switcher and the install dialog. The maskable entry is an addition, not a substitute.

Background matters too. The cropped area shows your icon's own background, so a transparent PNG will reveal whatever the launcher puts behind it. Fill the full square with your brand colour and the crop looks deliberate at any shape.

How to check before shipping

Chrome devtools → Application → Manifest shows your icons with their declared purpose. If none says maskable, that is your answer without installing anything.

If the install option is not appearing at all, that is a different problem with its own checklist. To see the crop itself, install the app on a real Android device and look at the home screen — emulators often use a square launcher that hides the problem entirely. That gap between emulator and device is why this defect survives so long in production.

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