Tile Shortcuts is a free theme personalization mobile app that allows you to customize your app icons’ shortcuts and add them to your notifications shade. Developed by Tom Bayley, this little tool focuses on app aesthetic and lets you choose the various different icons or shortcuts of any app that it can show on your phone. Tile Shortcuts is more than just shortcuts in a tile formation, as its best features concern icon personalization that appeals to the artsy type. This app can work in conjunction with other apps that affect the notifications shade and such.

Here’s the shortcut

Depending on your mobile operating system, your options to customize your phone’s look may be either varied or limited. There’s your usual wallpaper for home screen and lock screen, you can change your font type and size, your clock can also have different colors or designs, and you can apply themes or icons to make things look unique. However, if you want more in-depth options, you’ll have to turn to apps. Tile Shortcuts is one of these apps and offers the ability to further customize icon shortcuts. 

With other apps, your shortcuts will either still look like the original icon or be another design entirely. With Tile Shortcuts, however, you can opt-out of the default look. First, you create a “tile” using the app by pressing the red plus button on the bottom of the screen. 4 sections will pop up, requiring input: Tile, Name, Icon, and Extras. Various options will show up under Tile: App, Shortcut, Intent, and URL. These are what will run when you tap the tile after it’s been created. 

If you choose an app for Tile, the Name will automatically be filled. The icon contains the tile types, on the other hand—letting you choose what design your shortcut icon will look like. The designs lean towards the minimalist gestalt look, but you can customize even further by using custom icons, preset icons, icon packs, and advanced edits. Overall, Tile Shortcuts is a pretty handy app. While the tutorial can be tricky and you’ll sometimes see your changes removed, but it does its job well enough.