Aug 9, 2009
What is apple-touch-icon.png?
The use of apple-touch-icon.png as defined by Apple is on the rise. This file is a small, square image that is primarily intended for bookmarking a web site on a mobile device.
The icon is used by the Apple iPhone OS and iPod touch software to add a web site shortcut to the Home screen. The benefit of creating an apple-touch-icon.png file is that the icon displayed for the site is defined by the web site owner rather than a thumbnail of the site content generated by the mobile device.
Aside from the benefit of a user-friendly icon, adding the icon can also clean up your web server logs. If you have HTTP status 404, file not found, entries in your access log:
visitor.example.com - - [01/Aug/2009:19:00:00 -0700] "GET /apple-touch-icon.png HTTP/1.1" 404 1024 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A543a Safari/419.3"
Then it is likely that you have visitors that want to save your site on their mobile device.