Icon themer is a well known customization app to create your own customized theme for home screen app icons, with icon themer you can even share your created profile with others to download and install, you can also download other preloaded themes in the icon themer and give the Iphone an exciting new look. Icon themer was launched by a Reddit user. Icon themer is basically a customized shortcut that would follow the necessary steps in order to create a custom app. Using the icon themer you are able to load the target app on your device or any of the iOS devices that you use.

With the icon themer app you can change the look of your apps icons to actually anything that you want. Apple with the launch of iOS 14, added a lot of new different widgets for you to use on your home screen which are on a regular basis becoming quite popular. But as said everything comes in with a catch, as we mentioned these new apps icons are nothing but the shortcut to the original apps, and every time you will click on these icons it will first redirect you the shortcut app before opening up the main app. To overcome this lag of a few seconds, a reddit user has launched the icon themer app for you to use.

Icon themer makes use of web clips to directly launch the apps. Let’s look in detail about how to create the custom app icon with Icon themer.

How to install the Icon Themer App on your Iphone or any other iOS device?

Iphone or any other iOS device users can create shortcuts and can also share them using the iCloud facility offered by Apple for other people in your network to use them. Icon themer another complex shortcut to use that would have been very difficult to use for a non-advanced user. But with iCloud you do not have to worry about creating a shortcut for Icon themer, you can simply download the Icon themer app shortcut from icloud. Let’s have a step by step approach for the installation of Icon themer on your device.

Open the ‘Get Icon Themer” link on Safari web browser of your Iphone device
Once you have opened the link on your browser, navigate to the iCloud page
You may now be able to see the ‘Get shortcut’ button
Click on ‘Get shortcut’ button to redirect your screen the Icon themer shortcuts app
In case you have installed or used any external shortcuts anytime before, a pop up will appear on your screen to change security settings. Don’t be afraid with this message as it is not harming your device security and also it does not mean that Icon themer is not safe.
For you to install any external shortcuts, you just have to turn on settings
1. Open the settings page on your device
1. Click on Shortcuts
1. Simply turn on the toggle to ‘Allow Untrusted Shortcuts’
1. Once you have changed the settings, another dialog box will appear asking for permission to install the app or not
1. Click on ‘Allow’
1. As a next step for confirmation, it will ask for your Iphone passcode
1. Enter the passcode and that’s it the setting is ON
As you have now changed the settings, now you will again have to redirect yourself on the browser using ‘Get Icon Themer’ link
Click on the ‘Get shortcut’ button
Page will be redirected to ‘Add Shortcut’ page in the shortcuts app
You can now review the entire code shortcut code written on this page before proceeding further
Once you are satisfied with the code, scroll right to the bottom of the page
Click on ‘Add Untrusted Shortcut’ button

That’s it you have now successfully installed the Icon themer app on your device, enjoy customizing your home screen with new themes and getting a whole new experience.

Don’t worry about how to start customizing the apps, in this article we have complete details on creating custom apps using Icon themer.

Creating Custom iOS app Icons with Icon Themer

As we have successfully installed the Icon themer app, let’s begin creating some custom icons for any app that you want using the Icon themer on your device. Icon themer is quite different from others apps in this segment, as with other shortcut apps you might have to create multiple different shortcuts for each app individually but with Icon themer you can just run this shortcut and use it individually for each app. As of now with Icon themer you cannot create shortcuts in bulk, but it is believed to be made available in the future upgrades, as it is one of features that creator icon themer is still working on.

Icon themer is a type of custom shortcut app that would follow some necessary steps in order for you to get the custom app, icon themer even have some edge over the apps in terms of opening any shortcut app, as it will directly load the target app on Iphone and also any iOS devices, which is not available in other apps and you will be redirected via the shortcut app first. Icon themer works best with iOS 14 but can still work with iOS 13 quietly flawlessly.

Let’s have a step by step guide to use Icon themer to customize the apps

Open the shortcuts app. Navigate to the ‘My Shortcuts’ tab from the navigation bar, you can now see the ‘Icon Themer’ shortcut app on your screen
Click on the ‘Icon themer’ shortcut to start running the app
Once the app is opened, click on the search bar
Select ‘Search in App store’ on the next step. Enter the name of the app you would like to search and customize it’s icon theme using the icon themer app
Click on Done, after entering the name
You can see the list of all available apps in the Iphone’s app store based on your search criteria. Select the app you would like customize
A pop up message would appear on the screen asking for your permission to access the itunes.apple.com. Click on OK to continue further
As a next multiple different options will appear on your screen to choose an icon for your app
Select as per your requirement, you can choose to select a photo from Iphone photos or files.Navigate to the location where the photo you would to use as an icon is stored
Primarily for this article let us consider the option of ‘choose from photos’ as a customization option for the icons using icon themer
After you choose the option to select photo, icon themer would ask for permission to access you photos folder
Click on OK to grant the access to icon themer

Note: In case the ‘Choose from files’ option was selected, permission to access the files won’t be required by icon themer

All your photos will now appear on the screen, select the photo that you would like to use as the app icon.

Note: Icon themer does not provides the facility to edit or adjust the thumbnails at the time of selecting the icon, which may or may not possible with the other apps

Icon themer would now ask for a name suggestion from you, that you would like to display as the label under the icon. In case you do not want write anything below the app icon, it is recommended to insert in a single space instead of leaving the column as completely blank, to avoid any possibility of errors
Click on ‘Done’ and proceed to next steps
URL schemes fetched from Github will now be displayed on the Icon themer app screen in the next step. You can simply click on ‘Done’ here
Icon themer will now be redirected to Safari web app and a pop up message would appear as notification that the website is trying to download a configuration profile from servers. Click on ‘Allow’
It will take few seconds or minutes based on your internet speed to download the profile
Once the profile is downloaded, you can now go to the settings app. The option of ‘Profile Downloaded’ will be available towards the right top of the settings. Click on that option
Click on Install on the upper right corner, again Icon themer will ask for Iphone passcode to authenticate, it is no fraud. Enter the passcode to complete the installation

Note: Warning message may appear that the profile is not signed, you ignore the same and click on ‘install’ again to proceed

That’s it! You have successfully created the custom icon with the icon themer app that is now available on the home screen to use. You may now click on the icon to directly the main app, without having been redirected via shortcut app.

Creating Custom for System Apps with Icon Themer

System apps customization using Icon themer is slightly different from customizing the app store apps. From the list of differences the major one is that you won’t have the option to select the app directly like you did in the app store, it is a little more manual kind of a process. Also working of shortcuts for system apps is not as flawless or seamless when compared to the app store apps. For some of the system apps icon themer may open the shortcut app before the main app, but on the other hand some apps may show a blank page at first, that are customized using the icon themer.

In order to create a shortcut for a system app, follow the steps below

Run the icon themer shortcut app and select ‘Custom Bundle ID’
Enter the Bundle ID and click on ‘Done’ (check the apple’s support page for bundle id)
All the steps after that are similar to ones done above for app store apps

Following are some of the system apps that are not supported by the icon themer because of the missing URL scheme to open these apps.

Compass
Contacts
Facetime
Measure
Numbers
Pages
Tips

Below apps cannot be used directly by the icon themer, but have to pass through the shortcuts as they use private URL schemes.

Calculator
Camera
Clock
Phone
Voice Memos
Weather

You feel this customization to be quite a lengthy process, but it is nothing like that as it only takes a few couple of minutes to create a shortcut for an app using icon themer.The shortcuts created using icon themer run seamlessly on iOS 14. It is also advised to use iOS 14 while creating custom app icons with the icon themer, as can use the app library to hide the original app icons that will reduce the redundancy. And in case you are using iOS 13, then you can enable the Reduce Motion option to make your shortcut work more seamlessly.

Final Note

You may have self understood uptil now that icon themer is one best available option for you to customize your iOS home screen. Using icon themer you can create and can also share the profile for others to use. Creator of Icon themer in constantly updating the icon themer shortcut. With the latest version of icon themer 0.4.4, the shortcut of the app now uses the name of the app for the profile. Which helps you delete the right profile in case you longer want it.

Using icon themer you may even get the details of each profile to check what specific customization is available in that app.

HOW TO USE ICON THEMER ON IPHONE?