I wrote a generator to automatically generate icons for your react native app from a single icon file. It generates your assets and it also adds them correctly to your ios and android project:

Update (04/09/2019)

We revamped our generator to be up to date with the ecosystem standards. You can now use @bam.tech/react-native-make.

You can install it using: yarn add @bam.tech/react-native-make in the react-native project

To use it react-native set-icon --path <path_to_png> --background <icon_background_color> --platform <android|ios>

And... that's it! Hope it can be useful for others :)

Recommendations:

• 1024x1024 base image
• No transparent background for iOS
• An icon which follows adaptive icons guidelines for Android

Here are some improvements over the previous tool: 🥳

• No Yeoman dependency, it is now a react-native-cli plugin
• No Image Magick dependency
• Creates Adaptive icons for Android
• Adds missing icons sizes for iOS

I would use a service to scale the icon correctly. http://makeappicon.com/ seems good. Use a image on the larger size as scaling up a smaller image can lead to the larger icons being pixelated. That site will give you sizes for both iOS and Android.

From there its just a matter of setting the icon like you would a regular native app.

https://help.apple.com/xcode/mac/8.0/#/dev10510b1f7

Set icon for Android application

I was able to add an app icon to my react-native android project by following this guy's advice and using Android Asset Studio

Here it is, transcribed in case the link goes dead:

How to upload an Application Icon in React-Native Android

1) Upload your image to Android Asset Studio. Pick whatever effects you’d like to apply. The tool generates a zip file for you. Click Download .Zip.

2) Unzip the file on your machine. Then drag over the images you want to your /android/app/src/main/res/ folder. Make sure to put each image in the right subfolder mipmap-{hdpi, mdpi, xhdpi, xxhdpi, xxxhdpi}.

3) Do not (as I originally did) naively drag and drop the whole folder over your res folder. As you may be removing your /res/values/{strings,styles}.xml files altogether.

Android Studio has a very handy icon asset wizard called Image Asset Studio (user guide here). It's quite self explainatory, and has a few handy effects and it's built right in:

Screenshot from Android Studio 4.1.3 on Windows 10

Update 2022

Since the Almouro's Answer is no longer maintained

Android and iOS icon

You can now generate icons with one command both for iOS and Android with rounded icon:

npx icon-set-creator create ./path/to/icon.png

I highly recommend using an icon with a size of at least 1024x1024 pixels

Adaptive Android icon

npx icon-set-creator create -b <background> -f <foreground> -A

background - The color (E.g. "#ffffff") or image asset (E.g. "assets/images/christmas-background.png")

foreground - The image asset (E.g. "assets/images/christmas-foreground.png")

Someone made a very easy to use tool just for this task: https://www.npmjs.com/package/app-icon

This simple tool allows you to create a single icon in your react-native project, then create icons of all required sizes from it. It currently works for iOS and Android.

I've used it. Made a 512x512 png and then ran that tool and boom, done. Super easy.

This is helpful for people struggling to find better site to generate icons and splashscreen

• Make App Icon (useful for both android and ios)
• APE tools (useful for both android and ios)
• Icon set creator (useful for ios only)
• Andoid Asset Studio(useful for android only + recommended*)

Steps Android App icons: Go to this website https://appicon.co/

1. Add image their and generate icons, it should be downloaded

2. Unzip the folder

3. Inside their copy all the folders in AppIcons/android/ (i.e. Folder names: mipmap-xxxhdpi,mipmap-xxhdpi,mipmap-xhdpi,mipmap-hdpi,mipmap-mdpi)

4. paste above copied folders into {rootFolder}/android/app/src/main/res/ and replace existing ones

5. Remove this line from AndroidManifest.xml
   (android:roundIcon="@mipmap/ic_launcher_round")

Icons are successfully added

Change IOS App icons: Go to this website https://appicon.co/

1. Add image their and generate icons, it should be downloaded

2. Unzip the folder

3. Inside their copy all the folders in AppIcons/Assets.xcassets/ (i.e. AppIcon.appiconset folder)

4. paste the AppIcon.appiconset folder into {rootFolder}/ios/{projectname}/Images.xcassets/ and replace existing one

Icons are successfully added

You'll need different sized icons for iOS and Android, like Rockvic said. In addition, I recommend this site for generating different sized icons if anybody is interested. You don't need to download anything and it works perfectly.

https://resizeappicon.com/

Hope it helps.

For setting the App launch icon for Android Devices in a React-Native project:

• Take a high resolution image of your logo and place it inside your project directory. Preferably in [Project-DIR]/android/app/src/main/res/
• Open Android Studio and run your React-native project.
• In Android Studio's Project window, select the Android view
• Right-click the res folder and select New > Image Asset
• A "Configure Image Asset" window will open; Locate your high resolution image and place set it as your "Foreground layer".
• Set your "Background Layer" if applicable
• Click "Next" and continue to finish.
• Run your application again to see the new app launch icon.

Official documentation can be found here: https://developer.android.com/studio/write/image-asset-studio

If you're using expo just place an 1024 x 1024 png file in your project and add an icon property to your app.json i.e. "icon": "./src/assets/icon.png"

https://docs.expo.io/versions/latest/guides/app-icons

Use this library to make your work easier. It will automate your Icon generation process

https://www.npmjs.com/package/@bam.tech/react-native-make

I personally use this link to generate my desired icons https://appicon.co/

And for importing inside the application.

For IOS Setup

Click on your project from Xcode ==>

then on the left side you will see your click on that ==>

Now you will see subfile name Images.xcassets click on that ==>

you icons size will be displayed on the right hand window ==>

simply drag and drop the icons which we have generated from https://appicon.co/ ==>

and your IOS ICON SETUP IS DONE.

Moving to Android

We will go to Android ==> app ==> src ==> main ==> res

Here you will various folders named mipmap-hdpi till xxxhdpi ==>

Drag the icons from the specific folder to your project specific folder. Happy coding!

To import icons on React Native if you want the icons without having the pictures, then react-native-vector-icons would be the best one. You can use it if you don't want to download the icons and use it in your project.

I recommend to Monicon in 2025, it's deal great developer experience

Local Collections in Monicon allow you to use icons stored locally on your file system. These collections can be loaded using the loadLocalCollection function, which points to the directory containing your SVG files. This setup is ideal for projects where icons are managed locally, providing a quick and flexible way to integrate custom icon sets.

import { defineConfig } from "vite";
import react from "@vitejs/plugin-react";
import monicon from "@monicon/vite";
import { loadLocalCollection } from "@monicon/loader";

export default defineConfig({
  plugins: [
    react(),
    monicon({
      customCollections: {
        local: loadLocalCollection("assets/icons"),
      },
    }),
  ],
});

Example Directory Structure

For the above configuration, your assets/icons directory might look like this:

assets/
└── icons/
    ├── folder.svg
    ├── user.svg
    └── network.svg

Each SVG file in the directory is automatically assigned a name based on its filename (e.g., folder for folder.svg).

Usage

You can now use Monicon in your React components. Here’s an example of how to use an icon from your local collection in a React component:

import { Monicon } from "@monicon/react";

function App() {
  return (
    <main>
      <Monicon name="local:folder" size={24} />
      <Monicon name="local:user" size={24} />
      <Monicon name="local:network" size={24} />
    </main>
  );
}

export default App;