This process took me way longer than it should have to figure out. It turns out I needed to manually put the icons in the ./platforms/android/res/drawable* folders, clean the project to clear the cache, and rebuild it.

Below are the steps you need to follow to get your custom icon working with your PhoneGap Android app:

  1. Build the Android project as-is

    phonegap build android

  2. Replace the files in /platforms/android/res/drawable* with your icons. (Hint: If you don’t have a script to automatically generate the icon sizes, you can always create a new project in Eclipse with your custom icon and it will generate all the icon sizes for you, and you can even crop as a circle, or add a drop shadow as well.)

    /platforms/android/res/drawable-xhdpi/icon.png
/platforms/android/res/drawable-mdpi/icon.png
/platforms/android/res/drawable-ldpi/icon.png
/platforms/android/res/drawable-hdpi/icon.png
/platforms/android/res/drawable/icon.png

  3. Run a cordova clean on the project to clear the cache of old icon files

    ./platforms/android/cordova/clean

  4. Build the project again

    phonegap build android

If you did this properly and you’re running PhoneGap 3.4.0 you should be able to see the icons being crunched…

-crunch:
[crunch] Crunching PNG Files in source dir: /Users/kevin/Desktop/myapp/platforms/android/res
[crunch] To destination dir: /Users/kevin/Desktop/myapp/platforms/android/ant-build/res

If you are adding custom splash screens as well make sure they are all named screen.png and add these two lines to your config.xml

Please leave a reply if you have any questions.