Interview with Qunar Frontend Director Du Yao on the YIcon Platform

On March 28, 2017, Qunar held a meeting with Iconfont and eLong to introduce YIcon, a new icon‑font platform created by Qunar's mobile architecture team. The interview with senior frontend director Du Yao provides an in‑depth look at YIcon.

YIcon is an open‑source platform that integrates icon upload, review, display, font generation, and project management. It serves as a private implementation of Iconfont, allowing companies to deploy their own instance instead of using a public service.

Compared with Alibaba's public Iconfont, YIcon is not publicly accessible; it behaves like a GitLab application that can be installed privately, offering better control, security, and the ability to integrate with existing user systems via multiple login interfaces.

Key characteristics of YIcon include fixed Unicode Private Use Area (PUA) encoding, recyclable codes, a whitelist function, diverse search options (code, tag, name), upload review, project versioning, and user permission management. Additional advantages are its open‑source nature, deployability, support for custom login integrations, and extensibility for secondary development.

The platform uses a fixed code range (0xE000‑0xF8FF) to ensure stable icon identifiers, preventing mismatches when projects evolve. It also supports code recycling to avoid waste, and maintains detailed version histories for each icon project.

Since its launch, YIcon has been adopted across Qunar's PC, Touch, Native, Hybrid, and React Native projects, replacing image icons with font icons and streamlining designer workflows. The platform has been open‑sourced and is now used by many companies in online travel, fintech, retail, healthcare, and education sectors.

YIcon originated from a 2014 graduate‑training project and, after iterative improvements and a full rewrite in late 2015, became a mature, widely‑deployed solution. The team continues to accept issues and pull requests, encouraging community contributions.

For developers interested in adopting YIcon, documentation is available at http://yicon.ymfe.tech/ and the source code can be found on GitHub at https://github.com/YMFE/yicon .