Why is my smallIcon for Notifications always greyed out?

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First let’s understand the Android documentation which is as follows

“Update or remove assets that involve color. The system ignores all non-alpha channels in action icons and in the main notification icon. You should assume that these icons will be alpha-only. The system draws notification icons in white and action icons in dark gray.”

Now this is easy to miss and I have seen many apps that are live in the app store with thousands of users who haven’t followed the mentioned guidelines.

So let me explain in detail how you can convert your notification icon to an Android friendly one with a few clicks.

In your favourite image editor open up your icon file. Convert all parts of the image that you don’t want to show to transparent pixels. All colors and non transparent pixels are displayed in white. Let us go through an example.

EDITED: Thanks @Andrey Patseiko for the tool

For notification you have to use different icons for different versions of android:

Notification notification = new Notification.Builder(context)
                .setAutoCancel(true)
                .setContentTitle("My notification")
                .setContentText("Look, white in Lollipop, else color!")
                .setSmallIcon(getNotificationIcon())
                .build();
    return notification;

Get notification icon on the basis of version

private int getNotificationIcon() {
    boolean useWhiteIcon = (android.os.Build.VERSION.SDK_INT >= android.os.Build.VERSION_CODES.LOLLIPOP);
    return useWhiteIcon ? R.drawable.icon_silhouette : R.drawable.ic_launcher;
}