# Flash Pixel — Pixel art & retro icon editor

> Pixel art & retro icon editor (iPhone/iPad app by Shinichi Nanbu.)

- Source: https://appshunter.io/ios/app/flash-pixel/id6797162490 (this page in markdown: same URL + `.md`)
- Developer: [Shinichi Nanbu](https://appshunter.io/developer/1772380037)
- Category: Graphics & Design
- Price: Free
- Age rating: 4+
- Requires: iOS 26.0 · 9 MB
- Languages: American English, Japanese
- Released: 2026-08-11
- Data updated: 2026-10-31

## What is Flash Pixel?

Flash Pixel is a native pixel-art editor for Mac, iPad and iPhone with a specialty: it reads and writes the classic icon formats of the Windows and Mac past.

■ A pixel art editor
- Ten tools — pen, eraser, fill, eyedropper, line, rectangle, ellipse, rectangular select, lasso and magic wand — plus four adjustment pens that brighten, darken, fade or firm up the pixels you drag over
- Layers with visibility, opacity and reordering
- Animation: arrange frames on a timeline and export as GIF
- Grid overlay (three line widths), checkerboard or solid background, transparent color
- Smooth zooming with pinch and shortcuts

■ Palettes
- Eleven built-in palettes: Crayons 48 (default), PICO-8, Game Boy-style, NES/Famicom, Mac 16/256, Windows 16/256, web-safe 216, 16 grays, black & white
- Custom palettes, with GIMP (.gpl) and JASC (.pal) import and export
- An "in use" palette that lists just the colors in your artwork

■ Classic icon formats
- .ico (Windows icons): read and write, preserving resolutions and bit depths
- .icl (Windows 3.x icon libraries): not just reading — Flash Pixel writes them too, keeping icon names and groups
- .icns from old-generation variants through Retina (@2x), .cur editable with its hotspots, and .ani
- Icon extraction from .dll / .exe, and Classic Mac resource forks (Mac only)
- Plus PNG, GIF, BMP, WebP, XPM, Xcursor and APNG

■ Multi-resolution documents
- Keep dedicated canvases for 16, 32, 48, 256 px and more in a single document
- Exports prefer the dedicated canvas for each size, so small sizes stay hand-tuned

■ At home on Mac, iPad and iPhone
- A document-based native app with QuickLook previews and iCloud Drive support
- On iPhone and iPhone Duo, draw with your finger, pan with two fingers and pinch to zoom
- On iPad, draw with Apple Pencil, pan and zoom with your fingers, and double-tap to swap pen and eraser

■ Respectful by design
- Free. No ads, no account, no data collection
- Documents live on your device or in your own iCloud Drive

## Is Flash Pixel safe?

Not enough ratings yet to assess Flash Pixel.

## Is Flash Pixel legit?

Flash Pixel appears legitimate, with a few gaps. The AppsHunter Legitimacy Score for Flash Pixel is 65 out of 100 points across 7 verification signals from App Store and developer data.


## Version history (last 3 releases)

### 1.2 — 2026-10-21

Version 1.2 — now on iPhone and iPhone Duo.

- Draw with your finger by default on iPhone and iPhone Duo. Pan with two fingers and pinch to zoom.
- On narrow screens, tools sit along the bottom. Open colors, layers and the icon list when you need them.
- The layout adapts as you fold or unfold iPhone Duo and rotate the screen.
- Apple Pencil remains the default drawing method on iPad.

### 1.1 — 2026-09-19

Version 1.1 — icon libraries are now editable, and panels can live wherever you like.

■ New tools
- Magic wand: one tap selects everything connected to that pixel that shares its color — transparent areas included, so you can grab a whole knocked-out background at once. Shift-tap adds to the current selection.
- Four adjustment pens (brighten, darken, more transparent, more opaque): drag over pixels to nudge their color in place, without using the drawing color. Each pixel changes only once per stroke, so going back and forth does not blow it out. Empty pixels are left alone.
- Tool shortcuts: B brush, E eraser, G fill, I eyedropper, M marquee, L lasso, W magic wand.

■ Keeps what you open
- Re-saving .ico / .icl / .icns keeps the original member order and color tables, down to the color order and unused entries. Drawing with a color that isn't in the table asks first before releasing the preservation.
- Indexed color is now tracked by per-pixel palette numbers. Files whose tables list the same color more than once keep each dot's exact entry through editing and saving.

■ Icon library editing
- Add, delete, rename and reorder icons right in the sidebar.
- Copy an icon into another document (Mac), or drag it to another window's sidebar on iPad. Drop images or icon files from Finder / Files onto the sidebar to import them — depths, color tables and names travel along.
- Export All — every icon in a library (.icl / .dll / .exe / resource fork) at once, either as one .ico per icon or as a single .icl.

■ Edit the color table directly
- Resources with indexed color show their own color table at the top of the palette. Right-click → "Change Color…" swaps the table entry itself, and every pixel using it follows along — just like ResEdit.

■ Wider format coverage
- Cursors (.cur) now open in the editor and save back to the same format. Hotspots are stored per size and can be adjusted anytime.
- Animated cursors (.ani) keep a hotspot per frame, on read and on write.
- Resource forks gain color cursors (crsr), color patterns (ppat) and patterns (PAT).
- .icns can now be written in the System 8.5-era 32-bit formats and the Retina (@2x) types. 48px icons keep full color.
- Icon Composer (.icon) export gains a "Gaps between pixels" option, so Liquid Glass renders every pixel as its own tile for a pixel-art look.

■ Panels go where you want
- The color palette and the actual-size preview can be pinned to a full-height bar at the right edge of the screen. Everything moves by drag — two zones light up at the right edge to sort them.
- The actual-size preview also snaps to the top of the canvas as a wide horizontal bar. Magnifications now include 2× / 4× / 8× alongside 1×.
- Tab hides the panels — tap to toggle, or hold to hide only while the key is down.

■ Drawing feel and first launch
- Thumbnails, the actual-size preview and the timeline refresh on a throttle while you draw, so icon-heavy libraries no longer stutter.
- A tidier first launch: the actual-size preview and palette sit in the pinned panel at the right edge, and the Resources & Layers sidebar opens only for documents that need it. On Mac, the very first window opens centered at a comfortable size.
- The canvas can be pushed to the edge of the view, and a position you set yourself survives resizing and hiding panels.

■ Fixed
- Fixed .icon files exported for Icon Composer looking blank there and failing Xcode's icon compile.
- Fixed the app hanging right after launch (Mac).
- Fixed the right edge of the Resources & Layers panel being clipped at the default window size.

### 1.0 — 2026-08-18

No release notes.

## More apps by Shinichi Nanbu

- [Flash Log – Estimate & Track](https://appshunter.io/ios/app/flash-log-estimate-and-track/id6775522226)
- [PrintAdjust](https://appshunter.io/ios/app/printadjust/id6816251225)
- [Flash Books – Document Library](https://appshunter.io/ios/app/flash-books-document-library/id6818143047)
- [Stream — WBS & Gantt](https://appshunter.io/ios/app/stream-wbs-and-gantt/id6818887076)

All apps by Shinichi Nanbu: https://appshunter.io/developer/1772380037

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*Data collected daily from the US App Store and indexed by [AppsHunter](https://appshunter.io/). User reviews are verbatim App Store reviews. Ratings, prices and chart positions refresh continuously; this snapshot is from 2026-10-31.*