Comment 8 for bug 1864307

Actually, I just realized that Ubuntu has its very own, new flavor of this bug due to shipping gnome-software as a Snap. The `appstream` package is seeded with the minimal desktop seed, which is good, but in order for the Snap version of GS to install any icons, the `apt-config-icons` package also has to be installed - GS isn't smart enough to fall back to downloading icons in many cases and expects those to be present. The `gnome-software` package depends on the icon config, but the Snap store doesn't have this on new installations.
So, to fix this issue both the patch I linked in this report and a default dependency on `apt-config-icons` is needed.

The reason the `appstream` package doesn't depend on the icons on its own is that the data may also be used on servers and more minimal systems (e.g. for firmware and driver information) where downloading the icons isn't required. Therefore, all software centers in Debian/Ubuntu depend on the `apt-config-icons*` package(s) they need.