Looking back to an incredible year

Back in 2020 when I started working on this project, I never believed that it would last this long. Over the last four years, we've added so many things to Arcticons that made this project so much more than it already was. We've become the biggest FOSS icon pack out there (sorry team Delta ❤️), with close to 12k icons.

But there also were many things that are practically invisible to the end-user, that absolutely deserve a spotlight.

Request dashboard

Searching for the most requested icons and adding them to the app was a struggle to do, it required going into a text-file and looking for possible entries. So we've made an online dashboard to improve this process. With many tweaks, we made it easier to use, open-source and transparent for the end user to see how many times their icon has been requested. This also allowed unlimited icon request to be a thing, allowing us to have a more accurate image of the most popular apps out there.

Knowledge base

This year, we introduced a new platform to find information about Arcticons. Powered by GitBook (thanks for sponsoring us!), we were able to set up a comprehensive wiki with information for troubleshooting, contributing and more.

One of my personal highlights is the launcher compatibility list; displaying many popular launchers and their icon pack support.

Breezy weather icons

Thanks to the powerful theming engine of the popular open-source Breezy Weather app, we added our icons there too, without a standalone app needed. When you install Arcticons, it's all included in there.

Redesigning many icons

One of the few things bugging me over the years were the square icons looking a bit dated. So we made them a bit rounder. This was a process of going through thousands of icons and changing the corner radius.

Categories

You might have noticed some new categories inside the apps already, this year we expanded the selection further with the games category. Our categories are created automatically with every release, and previously it was only possible to create categories with prefixes, like calendar_ for example. So we've made some adjustments to our scripts to also allow a custom list of names to be added to the category. It's far from complete, but it's a good start. And adding entries to our categories is an easy way to contribute to the project.

Automation

Creating a new release required many steps in the past to get done. The process was something like using a script to raster all icons from vector to PNG, modifying the changelog on four different places, generating a release image, updating the version code, upload APKs to GitHub, upload app bundles to Google Play, and some other steps. This was a time-consuming process. However, we made some advancements this year that made it way easier to release a new version than before.

Almost all the tasks mentioned above are now automated through Android Studio build actions in combination with GitHub actions for automatic APK building and publishing. I'm super thankful for these things, as I'm still really unfamiliar with all the code stuff, and this allows me to focus more on the art-direction part of Arcticons.

Updates to Arcticons Sans

Improved kerning, many new symbols, including emoji's, small figures, alternate characters and other fixes.

And in September, Arcticons Sans popped up on Dafont! Months after I submitted it, the site that I made so much fun of at my design school accepted it. At the time of writing it has 6000+ downloads already.

OnionOS

Another super cool surprise this year was when Joel, one of our contributors, showed me Arcticons icons running on his handheld gaming device running OnionOS. After that, he expanded it to a full theme, available on the official OnionOS theme repo!

Enhancements

From PNG to WebP: We've converted our icons, they're sometimes 50% smaller, without affecting the overall quality.

Contributor images: One of the key points of Arcticons is it's fully offline compatibility; however, that meant that contributor images couldn't be loaded. Thanks to some nifty scripting work, all contributor images are now inside the app, and refreshed with every release to make sure they stay up-to-date.

Clock widget: can be opened with third-party clocks now.

Closing note

90% of these advancements weren't possible without Kaiserdragon, who helped me with almost all the technical advancements.

And of course, thanks to every other contributor that helped me over the years improving Arcticons. ❤️

Thanks for reading, I hope 2025 brings lots of cool stuff! ❄️

— Onno