My experience building macOSicons and its future plans

A year ago, I never thought I would see a website I built have and as niche as macOSicons.com getting over 55k monthly visits, and as a designer, app icons had never been something I spent much time working on, probably because I had never launched anything that required one. But this is the thing with most ideas and side projects, one day, you're working on a bookmarking service, the next you blink, Apple announces Big Sur, and you see your side project being within the top 5 products of the day on ProductHunt.

To give you some context, macOSicons.com is the place to go for macOS icons, we have close to 6000+ Big Sur ready icons, from the most popular apps like Spotify, Chrome of the whole of the Adobe and Microsoft suite to really niche and unknown apps. And the best part is that they're all 100% free to download and created by users like you. Since it launched it has also grown to be a place with resources and templates to create new icons, and if you need help with installing an icon on your mac, I also made a guide.

When I started working on this, I didn't intend for it to become what it has become today. It's almost like it took a life of its own once it went viral with the release of macOS Big Sur; nothing I had done had changed, only now there were hundreds of thousands of new Big Sur users that wanted their dock to look pretty.

It's been a few months since the release, and something I've learnt is that there is still an unmet demand that goes beyond macOS users. Windows and Linux users have been asking for something similar to what we've created, and that is exactly what I'm aiming to build.

An open platform for all things icons.

I'm taking things one step a time, and I don't have a well-defined roadmap, but the following three will be my main focus for the next few weeks:

• User accounts, view the status of your own submissions and make changes to them.
• Support to directly upload .icns to the site.
• An API to access all the icons from your own app.

As I said, everything is still up in the air, and I still have many questions I need to answer, but one thing I know is that I will try my best to make that vision happen. If this sounds like something you might be interested in, then make sure to follow me on Twitter, join our Discord, subscribe to this blog (I have some fun articles already planned 😉) and if you're feeling super generous become a sponsor on GitHub or make a one-time donation.