Favicon · iOS

Apple touch icon not working? Here's what usually goes wrong

The apple-touch-icon is the icon iOS uses when someone taps "Add to Home Screen" on your site in Safari. It's a separate file from your regular favicon, with its own size and caching rules — which is exactly why it breaks so often even when the rest of your favicon setup is fine.

What it should look like

<link rel="apple-touch-icon" sizes="180x180" href="/apple-touch-icon.png">

The image itself should be exactly 180×180 pixels, a square PNG. iOS doesn't apply rounded corners or a shadow for you the way it once did on older versions — it uses the image roughly as given, so keep the important content away from the very edges.

Common causes

Wrong size. An icon that isn't 180×180 can be scaled awkwardly or ignored in favor of a smaller fallback.
No rel="apple-touch-icon" tag at all. Safari will fall back to a screenshot of your page instead, which looks broken.
Transparent background. iOS doesn't render transparency here — it fills it with a flat color (often white or black), which can clash badly with your design. Use a solid background in the source image.
Aggressive caching. iOS caches touch icons per device, sometimes for a long time. If you update the icon and it still looks old, the browser tab may be fine while the home screen icon lags behind.
Relative path issues. If the site is served from a subdirectory or behind a CDN with rewritten paths, a relative href can point somewhere that 404s.

How to fix a stale or missing icon

Double-check the file is genuinely 180×180 and square.
Verify the tag is present in your page's <head>, not just in a manifest file.
Flatten any transparency onto a solid background before exporting.
To bust the iOS cache while testing, change the filename (e.g. apple-touch-icon-v2.png) rather than just replacing the old file in place.
Remove the site from your home screen and re-add it to force a fresh fetch on your own device.

Check whether your site has a valid apple-touch-icon right now.

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