As many stock iPhone and iPad users know, Home Screen app icons are typically static images. A couple of exceptions do exist, such as the Calendar app that updates each day with the correct date and the Clock app that updates every second with a live analog clock.
But one developer by the name of Bryce Bostwick has found a way to exploit the native alternate icons feature in iOS & iPadOS to animate the Home Screen’s app icons.
In a video published to YouTube over Memorial Day weekend, Bostwick explains how this works, effectively forcing an app to change its static app icon frequently enough to give the illusion of a moving picture.
The video is a perfect blend of plain English and advanced coding techniques. So while end users may be able to generally understand how he’s making this work, it’s going to take a knowledgable app developer to reproduce the effect through coding.
For what it’s worth, iOS would ordinarily display a pop-up alert every time an app’s icon changes. It’s also worth noting that app icon changes can’t occur in the background; rather, only in the foreground while the app is being used, so this is where the trickery comes into play.
Bostwick’s method tricks iOS into thinking that a backgrounded app is actually running in the foreground and allows app icons to be changed without any input from the end user. The result is the ability to change app icons without the app actually being open and without the annoying pop-up that normally notices the user of an icon change.
Using a private API, Bostwick has updated his YouTube app icon to animate every time he earns a subscriber, but he has also created a few other animated app icons as a proof of concept. That said, this animated icon method can be assigned to happen only when certain events take place, so it doesn’t stay animated 100% of the time and drain your battery.
Personally, I like the idea of animated app icons on my Home Screen under certain controlled circumstances. I wish that Apple would allow developers to incorporate these types of things without using hacks or jailbreak tweaks to do so, but it seems unlikely that this will happen any time soon.
Unfortunately, since Bostwick’s method is something of a hack, it also seems unlikely that Apple will approve apps that utilize this hack in the official App Store. On the other hand, sideloading with utilities like AltStore and Sideloadly offer a workaround for this, permitting modified apps to be installed on one’s device via their Apple Developer-enabled Apple ID.
In any case, it’s awesome to see this proof of concept, and if we’re lucky, Apple could take this as a cool idea and allow it on stock iOS in a future update without the requirement of using hacks. But that could be wishful thinking…
Would you ever want animated app icons on your Home Screen? Tell us your thoughts in the comments section down below.