How to Find the Meaning of Lineage Android's Status Bar Icons
By @edent
· android LineageOS · 2 comments · 300 words · read ~322 times.
It's always a bit concerning when a new icon suddenly appears at the top of your phone's screen. Without any warning, my ageing OnePlus 5T - which now runs LineageOS - started showing this:
I know that, from right to left, it is showing me my battery percentage, WiFi strength, and that I'm using work mode. But what's the weird circle?
ZOOM! ENHANCE!
Well, that's not much help, is it!
Buried in the Android Automotive documentation is some information on how to "Customize Status Bar System Icons". It helpfully says:
Most resources for items displayed in the Status bar are provided in the following directory:
/platform/frameworks/base/packages/SystemUI/res/drawable
OK! That gives us something to work on.
Let's pop along to Lineage's GitHub repo to look in that directory. There are 650 icons in there (!) so I downloaded them all (!!).
Of course, Google can't do anything standardised like use SVG. It uses its own magical Android Vector Drawable format. You can individually convert the files to SVG online or in bulk on the command line.
After a bit of flicking through, I found this:
Which is from ic_statusbar_firewall.xml
This is a fairly new icon, introduced in March 2023. It appears in the status bar when an app tries to access the network but "allow network access" is turned off.
@Edent You mention your aging 5T. I just wanted to add that we've bought several OnePlus modles since the One. My 3T stilll works fine, it's on Spotify all day and can do video IP cam stuff just fine. The One still works but I don't use it much. They're pretty good phones for the price!
DinoNerd says:
This could perhaps be taken to the next level by extracting all the icons, converting them to a web-viewable format, and creating a web-viewable list with at least the file they came from. It would be better if the site could do some kind of search-by-image, and if some better indication of purpose than the file name could be automatically generated.
Net result - a wee bit of the documentation that would have been provided for users if the Android developers actually meant the status bar to be useful to those users. There'd still be the problem that the icons are too small for some of us to see, and the usual un-pinch gesture does NOT work to enlarge them. But it would be a small step in a useful direction.
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