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Nova Launcher’s latest beta adds support for Android Oreo’s adaptive icons

One of the lesser-known features in Android Oreo is the ability to customize the shape of icons on your launcher. This feature is something we’ve seen in some launchers and icon packs, but Oreo’s implementation uses officially supported APIs to do this a bit more reliably. Now, fan-favorite Nova Launcher is adding support.

Nova Launcher 5.5-beta is live now on Google Play for those signed up as a beta tester (or as an APK) and includes support for adaptive icons. This functionality is available not only on Oreo, but also on every Android version all the way back to Lollipop.

Adaptive icons are still pretty new, so not everyone supports them. To fill in the gap, Nova offers the option to mask legacy icons with the adaptive shape you choose. Nova’s main developer, Kevin Barry, outlines the feature on Google+, and also notes how he has ideas to improve it in the future.

As Android Oreo and Adaptive Icons are still in their infancy, not many apps are providing them yet. So we’ve also added an option to automatically scale and shape legacy icons for consistency. This is still a work in progress as there are some more ideas I have to explore to make this work a bit better.

If you’re running Nova Launcher v5.5, you can access this feature by heading into the settings under “look and feel.” From there, pick your shape through the “adaptive icon shape” setting.


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