Free The Icons

With last year’s release of MacOS 26 (Tahoe), Apple made a mess of app icons. In the first betas of MacOS 27 (Golden Gate), however, there are signs of a turnaround. We’re urging Apple to continue making improvements, by restoring the ability for MacOS app icons to have distinct shapes.

Apple’s Liquid Glass App Icons

In Tahoe, Apple modified the icons for dozens of their first-party apps to give them a “Liquid Glass” appearance. The changes were a substantial regression, leading to blurry, dumbed-down icons.

With the recently unveiled Golden Gate, Apple has again updated their MacOS app icons. This time, however, the changes are genuine improvements. Here’s the refined Automator icon, for example:

The newer icon is sharper, with superfluous Liquid Glass removed. Dozens of Apple’s apps have seen similar updates. The result is that Golden Gate’s icons are superior to Tahoe’s, as this comparison from Basic Apple Guy shows. Seeing these improvements led me to think about another fix Apple should make in MacOS.

The Problem of Tahoe’s Dictated Squircles

With the Tahoe release, Apple didn’t just mess with their own icons. They also dictated the shape of every third-party app icon, forcing them to adopt the same prescribed squircle. Any icon that failed to do so found itself shrunk down and imprisoned in an ugly gray background, in order to fit Apple’s desired aesthetic.

Audio Hijack’s icon as it used to appear, and in Tahoe icon jail

To avoid this icon jail, developers were forced to redesign their icons to match Apple’s preferred form. After decades of beautiful, memorable Mac icons in varying shapes, Tahoe flattened personality to obtain bland uniformity. The platform is worse for it.

Past icons weren’t just more expressive. They were also more usable. Having distinct shapes provided a useful way to tell icons apart. Tahoe eliminates that cue by forcing everything into the same squircle, leaving color as the primary way to tell icons apart at a glance.

That falls down if you’ve got color vision deficiency, or even just multiple icons with similar color schemes.1 I’m looking at you, Slack and Photos. I have to look closely, because it’s so difficult to tell you apart now.

It Doesn’t Have to Be Like This

Apple’s prohibition on shapes is a step backward for both usability and creativity in app icons. Icons are now harder to distinguish because they’re no longer allowed to be distinctive. But there’s no technical reason for it. Apple could, and should, once again allow icons to take on a wide variety of shapes.

It’s clear that some people within Apple recognize that the transition to Liquid Glass introduced mistakes. They also appear to have the authority to fix those mistakes. Refinements to Apple’s own icons in Golden Gate are a welcome course correction, as is the much-celebrated Liquid Glass opacity slider. It’s time to correct the mistake of banning icon shapes as well.2

Apple should stop forcing every icon into the same squircle. Let’s return to a world of gorgeous app icons like these:

Free the icons.

Footnotes:

With color now so critical to tell icons apart, it should be no surprise that the new “Clear” and “Tinted” icon styles added in Tahoe are seeing so little uptake. As Adam Engst noted, “[I]t’s nearly impossible to identify a particular app when they’re all clear or tinted squircles, as you can see below. My brain just shuts down when it sees them.”

I’m not sure this “Tinted” style would be a good idea even if these icons had distinct shapes, but I know it’s a very bad one given their uniformity. ↩︎

For folks within Apple, this was feedback filed as FB23388490 (“Third-Party App Icons Should Not Be Restricted to Apple’s Dictated Squircle Shape”). I imagine it is a duplicate many times over. ↩︎