Nova Launcher:
If you’re seeing blank/empty/missing icons in Nova Launcher, you may need to change “reshape legacy icons” in Nova Launcher settings:
- Press and hold on an empty area of the home screen.
- Tap Settings.
- Look & Feel.
- Icon Style.
- Set “Reshape Legacy Icons” to “off”
The new gradle builds required for the latest version of Android restructure a file called shader.xml. Some launchers read this file wrong now resulting in missing/blank icons. I’ve verified Apex and blackberry launcher have this issue so far.
Please help me out by writing to the launcher devs asking them to read icon pack shaders.xml values in any order to fix this. I’ve emailed them of course, but the more squeaky wheels the better, right? Hopefully, with enough emails, they’ll update their code quickly to address this issue. You can find a template to send them below. Thanks and sorry about the issue!
You can help by notifying developers with a pre-populated email using the buttons below:
If the buttons above aren’t working, here’s a template you can send to the Apex & Blackberry developers
Apex devs:
[email protected]
Blackberry devs:
[email protected]
Icon pack shader.xml issue
Hi, The latest version of Gradle builds restructure a file named shader.xml. Shader.xml is a file included in icon packs that changes the appearance of un-themed icons.
Here’s an example of a line of code from the original shaders.xml file:
<exec t="OA" m="W" v="IA" />
And here’s the same line of code after building the apk with Gradle version 7.1.2:
<exec m="W" t="OA" v="IA" />
The data is the same but the order of the data has been alphabetized. For whatever reason, this causes an error when it’s read by the launcher, resulting in the launcher showing a blank icon.
Please update the launcher to accept this data in any order. For reference, Nova launcher can read this data and will display icons that have been changed by shader.xml in the latest Gradle builds.
Thanks for your time!
Yes, Apex Launcher still has this issue. I’ve left shaders.xml in my apps because I think it’s beneficial to the launchers that support it correctly.
Hey Nate, thanks a lot for sharing this. Do you know whether this is still an issue as of August 2023? I’m an icon pack developer myself and wondering whether including a shader.xml might do more damage than good. Testing this on Apex launcher today, unthemed icons still appear empty to me.
Cheers,
Stefanie