Change icons without BetterCut

[RichStevenson]

You can change both the text and icon of your home screen shortcuts without needing to use BetterCut or other app, although BetterCut makes it a whole lot easier. With that said, this was just a curiosity thing for me. It's probably best to just use BetterCut.

You don't need root for this.
Tested on 2.0.1 only, but I'm guessing it would work on 2.1 as well.

Pull /data/data/com.android.launcher/databases/launcher.db from the phone.

Download and install: It's free.
SQLite2009 Pro Enterprise Manager
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Open the launcher.db with SQLite.
Expand Tables and click on 'favorites'.
Select the Table Data tab.

You'll see all of your folders and shortcuts on your home screen.
To change the text, edit the 'title' field.
Change the 0 in field 'itemType' to 1
Change the 0 in field 'iconType' to 1

You must add an icon to the icon field, even if you want to use the default app's icon. So either extract it from the app's apk, or use another .png to replace the icon.If you skip this step, the icon will display with the default system icon.

Exit out of SQLite.
Push launcher.db back to /data/data/com.android.launcher/databases/
And reboot.

As a side note, if you have tons of shortcuts/folders, you can pull down launcher.db from your phone, and then push it back after a phone wipe to restore your shortcuts.

[Big Lou]

Nice! This would be a cool way to theme the icons with the Smoked Glass ROM!

[RichStevenson]

Smoked glass icons would be very cool!

[Matth3w]

Say I have an icon pack on my SD card under \sdcard\icon. Say I want to replace the ChompSMS icon with sms.png located in that folder. How do I link to that under iconResource? And do I have to specify something for IconPackage there?

[Humpa]

With BetterCut you must at least use a "space" for the title. Will this method allow me to leave the title blank so I can just have the icon without anything at all showing underneath?

[Matth3w]

That is an interesting question....it would really clean up the home screen IMO.

[tktouch12]

this is great info. thanks. i might just have to give this a try