Delta Icons
2016 — today
User Interface Design
Android Development
As a nerd and Android user of about the first hour i constantly tinker with my phones or modify and customize them to my hearts desire, functionally as well as optically. And as one thing lead to another i started creating my own icon pack in 2016.
For those unitiated to Android customization: an icon pack is a bundle that allows you to replace the default icons on your homescreen with custom ones. There are quite a bunch of them out there, providing people with different options.
A lot of the success of Delta (my icon pack) most probably stems from it straying away from the material design hype of the time and leaning more into a clean and minimalistic look. The first eight icons were posted to Google Plus († 2019) and included in the expanded preview i later on posted on reddit.
From concept to release
With the help of Bohemian Coding's software Sketch and suggestions from the community i designed the first 150 icons before realising that distribution would be tricky, because i didn't know a thing about Android programming at the time. But to my luck the open source community on GitHub had just what i needed. A now deprecated project by Aidan Follestad named Polar Dashboard provided an Android Studio project as well as documentation on how to customize it for my specific need and was therefore the base for the first release.
Sideproject on steroids
While the first feedback was already more than i expected it to be, the reactions by time got even more incredible. Hidden in between the spam mails you get as a Play Store publisher was a mail i nearly discarded that turned out to be from the agency that executed the '#myandroid'-campaign. During the first 7 days of this online event Delta saw a rise to 50,000 downloads a week.
Further coverage on outlets like XDA, droidLife, phoneArena, FossBytes and communities on Reddit and YouTube helped a lot with further user acquisition, which by now resulted in over 3 million downloads and over 200,000 active installations (from the Play Store alone, i've seen Delta distributed on chinese platforms which i do not have access to).
Teamwork
With demand for new icons way above my head i had to choose between quitting and delegating. So luckily my choice to publish it on GitHub turned out to be a good one. Constantly trying to improve the contribution experience by providing resources and permanently working on improving communications and workflow optimizations for all participants.
Conclusion
What started off as a fun little design excercise has now become a project spanning over multiple years. In that time i learned a lot about user engagement, organizing remote teams and streamlining their process, as well as respecting my own need for free time in between releases. And here are a few stats to give you a rough idea of the sheer volume of this project:
- 2,300+icons designed
- 3,000,000+downloads from Google Play Store
- 100+merged Pull Requests on GitHub
