Hi there! I installed Nexus Dock on my Windows 11 machine, but some built-in Windows app icons don't appear correctly. In the first image, the three icons on the right have a blue background and appear low-quality when hovering over them. In the second image, those same icons have no background in the Windows taskbar. Finally, in the third image, you can see how low-quality they look when hovered. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

This is a fault of MSIX packaging and currently there is no fix for this. Any app packaged with this format uses a dynamic icon, with accent coloured background. This was for Windows 8 UWP apps to show their icons correctly outside of UWP-based environments, such as Windows Explorer. Old UWP app icons are also monochrome, so they look like dogcrap without it.

Thank you for your response, much appreciated.

Hello! I wanted to let you know the icons are fixed! they no longer have the Windows accent color background. There’s a little blurriness when hovering, and also the built-in app icons appear slightly smaller than the other icons on my dock — you can see the difference in the screenshot. I’m very grateful you addressed the core issue. Thank you for your work on this, I really appreciate it. Wishing you the best!

Can't take the credit for something I didn't do. Although I did try to see if there was a way to remove the colored background, there was nothing I could do because of protected folders, etc...

However, Microsoft itself addressed this issue in the May Windows update, removing the background accent color of the UWP app icons. What they did also broke the display of UWP app icons in Winstep applications, which now showed a blank page for every UWP app (!). This problem too was fixed in the very next Winstep release.

As for the apparent smaller size of the UWP apps, that is just how they were originally made, whoever at Microsoft created them left a large empty area between the image itself and the inner edges of the icon. The icons of some other UWP apps (normally 3rd party, ChatGPT app icon, for instance) that take full advantage of the image space available look huge by comparison.

I replace all Windows App Icons (and most other icons) when using Winstep, with icons I have downloaded. That way the icons always stay the way I want them to look, and everything seems to load faster.

These two links should be enough to get started with Windows Apps:

https://www.deviantart.com/theninjacat2 ... -835108137

https://www.deviantart.com/eatosdesign/ ... -817313544

You will need a free basic account to download from DeviantArt.

I believe the icon sets are also available elsewhere. Just Google Windows 10X icon pack.

If you find an App not in the pack just search for it.

Both downloads contain ICO's and PNG's. I found the PNG's sometimes look the best.

Nice! Thanks, Nezbit.

Looking at the two packs it seems to me these are simply scaled up versions of the original Microsoft icons, not actual re-interpretations. Must have been a lot of work at the time, these days all you need to do is ask one of the AI engines to scale it up for you.

I see! So it can break whenever Microsoft decides to change the way icons work. Thank you for following up and for trying to fix the problem.
Also, thanks a lot for explaining what happened in detail.

Thank you very much for sharing your approach and for the links to the icons, Nezbit!

Actually, I also use custom icons for all of my pinned apps on the dock, but not for every app on my machine. The method you mentioned is a clever workaround to get most of the icons looking good.