Question

According to http://developer.android.com/guide/practices/ui_guidelines/icon_design_status_bar.html – Status bar icons should be white without any color.

Many apps I have have colored status bar icons, while some follow the guidelines and remain white.

My question is how strict is this guideline? If we allow our users to change the color of the status bar icon, will this prevent our app from being accepted into the Play store?

Any thoughts would be helpful. Thanks

Answer 1

The guidelines are only guidelines 🙂

If you mean with “accepted into the play store”, that your app would be removed by Google, when not having white icons: no, it wouldn’t. As you already mentioned, there are a lot of apps around there that doesn’t stick to the guidelines.

If you wonder, if your app will be accepted by the users: it depends. I know a lot of apps, not sticking to the guideline and still getting pretty high rankings, and also looking very good in my personal opinion. And the other way around, I know apps using white Icons, and still looking not good, e.g. because they use some cross platform toolkits, that create apps, looking like iOS-Apps, that just doesn’t fit well into Android.

Another remark: The Design guidelines are quite new, so there are a lot of apps out there, that wasn’t designed with respect to them. So of course, if you are building now an app, it should fit that as good as possible, but still, don’t take it as fixed rules. There might be cases, your app will just look better, if it looks a bit different from guidelines. In the end, it’s user experience that matters!

Some interesting talks from Google I/O 2012 about the design of apps:

• https://developers.google.com/events/io/sessions/gooio2012/112/
• https://developers.google.com/events/io/sessions/gooio2012/115/