What is decant?

Decant is a command-line tool for Mac developers and designers who want to inspect or recreate Apple's built-in app icons from iOS and macOS 26. Apple introduced a new icon style called Liquid Glass with that version, and the icons are stored in a compiled format that Apple's own Icon Composer design tool cannot open directly. Decant reads those compiled icons, recovers every layer and its rendering properties, and writes out an editable folder that Icon Composer can open. To use it, you need a Mac with Xcode 26 and an iOS 26 simulator installed. You run it from the command line with an app name (Maps, Photos, Safari) and it exports a .icon bundle to your current folder. Most system apps are available from the simulator, a handful (App Store, Podcasts) were excluded by Apple and require a device restore image called an IPSW. The README explains how to mount one and point decant at it. The extraction captures each icon's layers: vector and raster artwork, blend modes, opacity, glass and translucency effects, shadows, specular highlights, and per-appearance settings for light, dark, and tinted display modes. Every result is verified by recompiling with Apple's actool and comparing against the original until the values match exactly, which the README calls round-trip calibration. The tool is written in Python with a small Objective-C extractor that runs inside the iOS 26 simulator. This is necessary because iOS 26 added new properties to the icon format (refraction, specular placement) that can only be read back accurately from that environment. The extractor binary is compiled automatically on first run. Nothing from Apple's icon files is committed to the repository: the output icons folder is gitignored.