Why is my smallIcon for Notifications always greyed out?

I tried making the small icon exactly 16x16, gray-scaled, nothing but gray and white (the gray color being hex value 616161), to create a silhouette of my application icon.

Yet no matter what it just shows up as a white/gray square in the notifications. What am I doing wrong?

(My min api is 21, assuming it is relevant)

Follow this link

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

Along with new features and capabilities, Android 5.0 includes a variety of system changes and API behavior changes. Pl. go through the notification behavior changes.

Notifications are drawn with dark text atop white (or very light) backgrounds to match the new material design widgets. Make sure that all your notifications look right with the new color scheme. If your notifications look wrong, fix them:

• Use setColor() to set an accent color in a circle behind your icon image.
• 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.

So, basically you have to use silhouette icons as notification icon for API Level 21+