Why don't some app icons change color?

iOS 18 lets you customize the app icons on your iPhone and iPad. You can choose between light mode, dark mode, or a tinted appearance for your icons.

However, when you select the icons in dark mode, you may notice that not all the icons change. Here's why that happens…

iOS 18 gives users control over how their app icons look on the home screen for the first time. The feature is somewhat controversial, as opinions differ on whether the new options look good.

However, if you want to make your iPhone a little more personal, you can now edit all of your icons and give them a different design. You can even have the icons automatically switch to light or dark mode depending on the time of day.

How to use dark mode icons on iOS 18

• Long press the home screen of your iPhone.
• Tap Edit in the top left corner of the screen.
• In the menu that appears, tap Customize.
• Select Dark to choose the icon colors for dark mode. (Or select Automatic to show the icons in dark mode only at night.)

Why don't all app icons change color?

After changing your settings, you may notice that not all app icons switch to dark mode. For example, in the screenshot above, the Reddit icon remains a bright red instead of switching to a dark palette.

There are two reasons for this.

First, app developers will need to update their apps to include dark mode icons. As developers update their apps to include these new assets, your home screen will become more and more customized. With iOS 18 now publicly released, you can expect many more apps to adopt dark mode icons in the coming days.

If a developer hasn't provided a dark icon, the iOS system will attempt to render one instead. This is what you see with many third-party icons currently. The iPhone analyzes icons to detect foreground and background elements and applies an appropriate automatic theme.

However, this is not always possible. The Reddit icon is an example where the elements in the icon image are not automatically separated and therefore the colors are not changed at all. Instead, a slight dimming effect is applied to reduce the brightness of the icon. However, this obviously doesn't fit very well when the rest of the icons on the screen are predominantly black or gray.

As a user, there's nothing you can do about this except wait. You can't choose your own app icon images unless the developer has already built custom icon options into the application. To get dark mode icons, you'll have to wait for the developer to release an app update with the new iconography embedded, if iOS hasn't already done so.

If you choose tinted app icons instead of the dark style, iOS applies a different algorithm to change the colors of the icons. Tinted icons feature an accent color on a dark black background.

Unlike regular dark mode, the tint effect can be applied more universally, so if you want a consistent look across all your home screens, you may prefer tinted mode.