Can't get App Icons to work for iOS with Xamarin

Question

I have tried everything I have been able to find to get these app icons to work for iOS. No matter what I do, they will not appear, I am stuck with the default Xamarin icons. I even tried making an entirely new project to start fresh with it, and I am still stuck with the default Xamarin icons. I have to be missing something. I have all of the icons in the AppIcon Assets Catalog. The Info.plist is set to the AppIcon source. The Info.plist file is correctly pointing into the root folder for the Assets.xcassets folder. And finally based on other forum posts, I tried adding the Include Image Assets list to .csproj with no luck.

One thing I just realized is that I can completely delete the Assets folder from the root, and Visual studio does not care when it builds. This is incredibly frustrating. There is zero reason for this so be so difficult. Thank you ahead of time, I am completely lost at this point.

Answer 1

This may be the answer and I am having the exact same issue and have invested many hours in trying to overcome this.

I have created a new Xamarin solution and replaced all Xamarin PNGs with my own in the Asset Catalog and removed ALL the Xamarin images. Still the application and Launch screen display the Xamarin logo. Baffling and frustrating!

I am running the following environment:

Microsoft Visual Studio Enterprise 2019
Version 16.10.4

Xamarin   16.10.000.234 (d16-10@ecaf29b)
Xamarin Designer   16.10.0.115 (remotes/origin/c750fbf1bde3c720d077f51640fe197c6dac7cbe@c750fbf1b)
Xamarin Templates   16.10.5 (355b57a)
Xamarin.Android SDK   11.3.0.4 (d16-10/ae14caf)
Xamarin.Android Reference Assemblies and MSBuild support.
    Mono: b4a3858
    Java.Interop: xamarin/java.interop/d16-10@f39db25
    ProGuard: Guardsquare/proguard/v7.0.1@912d149
    SQLite: xamarin/sqlite/3.35.4@85460d3
    Xamarin.Android Tools: xamarin/xamarin-android-tools/d16-10@c5732a0
Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Mac SDK   14.20.0.24 (c4b89cddb)
Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Mac Reference Assemblies and MSBuild support.

I am testing on an iPhone 7 Plus with iOS 14.7.1 and using the following default Nuget packages:

NETStandard.Library 2.0.3
Xamarin.Essentials 1.6.1
Xamarin.Forms 5.0.0.2012 

Where is the Xamarin icon/logo coming from?

UPDATE: I found that the launch icons are coming from the Hot Restart feature of Visual Studio. I found the launch icon images in %HOMEPATH%\AppData\Local\Temp\Xamarin\HotRestart<version><code><project> folder. See https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/xamarin/xamarin-forms/deploy-test/hot-restart for details. From the page:

Limitations

• Only iOS apps built with Xamarin.Forms and iOS devices are currently supported.
• Only 64-bit iOS devices are supported. As of iOS 11, Apple no longer allows running iOS apps on the 32-bit architecture (devices earlier than iPhone 5s).
• Storyboard and XIB files are not supported and the app may crash if it attempts to load these at runtime. Use the HOTRESTART preprocessor symbol to prevent this code from executing.
• Static iOS libraries and frameworks are not supported and you may see runtime errors or crashes if your app attempts to load these. Use the HOTRESTART preprocessor symbol to prevent this code from executing. Dynamic iOS libraries are supported.
• You cannot use Xamarin Hot Restart to create app bundles for publishing. You will still need a Mac machine to do a full compilation, signing, and deployment for your application to production.
• Asset Catalogs are currently not supported. When using Hot Restart, your app will show the default icon and launch screen for Xamarin apps. When paired to a Mac, or developing on a Mac, your Asset Catalogs will work.