The icon is the first thing that people will meet when they see your app

1. Best Practices When Designing an
iPhone App Icon

2. The icon is the first thing that people
will meet when they see your app. To
ensure that you get the people's
attention you should ensure that your
icon stands out from the rest. For the
representation to stand out you need to
put the following good practices in
place:

3. Go for simple shapes
A simple shape ensures that the icon is easily recognizable
from a distance and at a glance. Due to this you should
ensure that you go for simple shapes such as circles,
rectangles or squares. In addition to ensuring that you use
a simple shape, you should also use a simple image that
will easily reduce and remain clear at different sizes.

4. Use a maximum of two colors
Although, there are many great colors that you can use, it's
usually very difficult to create a great icon with many
colors. This is because many colors tend to look ugly when
the icon's size is reduced or increased. To be on the safe
side you should use a maximum of two colors.

5. Avoid photos and a lot of text
These two make the icon look displeasing to the eye and fail to
motivate users to click on them. Experts say that photos and
words create abstraction of concept, object and operation.
Instead of using photos and words, you should use symbols. For
example, if your app is called Smep you can use "S" as your
symbol. By doing this the icon will look professional and will
provoke many people to click on it.

6. Don't add standard gloss
Although, Apple allows developers to add the standard gloss to
their icons when submitting them to the app store, you should
avoid adding the feature to your icon. This is because it makes
your icon look ugly. To be on the safe side you should leave
the icon plain.

7. Ensure that all materials are
accurately portrayed
It's very devastating when you put in a lot of resources and time in
creating an app and it can't portray the important features. For
example, the app fails to portray the image or the symbol that you
are using.
In such cases you should take a look at the software that you are
using. You should also take a look at the software settings. In some
cases the problem may be brought about by the size of the icon;
therefore, you only need to reduce or enlarge the size a little bit.
Resources:
http://iphoneapplicationdeveloper.co.uk
http://ezinearticles.com/?Best-Practices-When-Designing-an-
iPhone-App-Icon&id=8539487

8. Thank you for reading!