The colors of an app icon

At Appbot we get to see a lot of app icons while providing insights into app reviews.

In the past I have studied everything from app descriptions, to screenshots, to names, to countries. The one that has always really interested me most was app icons, but I never came up with an idea on how to really study what is effective.

Recently I stumbled across a cool Ruby library called Miro that extracts the dominant colors from an image.

Finding the dominant colors of apps shows some really interesting results.

The Method

Next I took the standard Web Colors (plus added yellow) and matched each web color to the closest. This grouped them into approximate names.

#02601e -> Green
#a8120c -> Maroon
#0c44de -> Blue
#bdbfc0 -> Silver
#f4b510 -> Yellow
#717973 -> Gray
#24721b -> Green
#2d0d0e -> Black

Ignoring black, white & grey and taking the four most common colors I plotted them on the a ‘Color Wheel’.

The large size of the icon represents a larger percentage of the icon containing that color.