Android Jetpack Compose Icons doesn't contain some of the material icons

Question

There're many oft-used material icons in androidx.compose.material.icons.Icons but some are missing. Just as an example there is no print icon.

...

import androidx.compose.material.Icon
import androidx.compose.material.icons.Icons
import androidx.compose.material.icons.filled.Menu  // ok
import androidx.compose.material.icons.filled.Print // error, unresolved reference

@Composable
fun IconsExample() {
    Icon(Icons.Filled.Menu, "menu")   // ok
    Icon(Icons.Filled.Print, "print") // error, unresolved reference
}

What is the simplest way to use those missing icons in an app?

Solution

There's a separate dependency material-icons-extended which contains the full list of material icons, just add it into your app's build.gradle

dependencies {
  ...
  implementation "androidx.compose.material:material-icons-extended:$compose_version"
}

Now you can use any material icon, for example:

...

import androidx.compose.material.Icon
import androidx.compose.material.icons.Icons
import androidx.compose.material.icons.filled.Menu  // ok
import androidx.compose.material.icons.filled.Print // ok

@Composable
fun IconsExample() {
    Icon(Icons.Filled.Menu, "menu")   // ok
    Icon(Icons.Filled.Print, "print") // ok
}

A note about the artifact size: Since the artifact contains all material icons for multiple themes, it's a pretty big dependency, 18MB aar as of 1.0.0-alpha10. There's a note on maven repository that recommends not to use it directly:

This module contains all Material icons. It is a very large dependency and should not be included directly.

Сonsidering that most Android projects enable code shrinking for release builds, such a large dependency won't affect the release build size but it can affect your debug build and device upload time, though I'm not sure that the influence would be significant. Actually many of compose samples use this dependency.

If only a few additional icons are required and you decided not to use material-icons-extended artifact, the icons can be easily added into your project resources using Android Studio. You can use such resource-icons like this:

...

import com.mycompany.myproject.R
import androidx.compose.ui.res.painterResource

@Composable
fun ResourceIconExample() {
    Icon(
        painter = painterResource(R.drawable.ic_baseline_print_24),
        contentDescription = "print"
    )
}

Comments

[Jesse Hill]

It seems that Google recommends against including the entire set of extended icons as stated on the repository. Do you know if we can only add those additional icons that are needed?

[Valeriy Katkov]

@JesseHill Thank you for the observation. I've updated the answer with some additional information including a sample of an icon which doesn't use material-icons-extended, hope it helps!

[Androbito]

please mark this answer as the acceptable one

[Barry Irvine]

I still can't see QuestionMark (fonts.google.com/…) for example even with the extended dependency...

[Robert Jeppesen]

Great answer, thanks. To get just a few icons, I made an isolated compose app, included material_icons_extended, jumped to definition on the icons I wanted, and copied the code to my project. I put it in our own namespace so I can keep track of which are used etc. A little cumbersome, but minimal overhead! Each icon is just a private and a public property, that's it.