Free the Icons: Rogue Amoeba Urges Apple to Restore Icon Shapes

Tahoe's icon mess and a partial turnaround

With macOS 26 (Tahoe), Apple overhauled the look of its app icons, giving dozens of first-party apps a “Liquid Glass” treatment that Rogue Amoeba's Paul Kafasis calls a substantial regression — blurry, dumbed-down icons. In the first betas of macOS 27 (Golden Gate), however, he sees signs of a turnaround: the refined Automator icon is sharper, with the superfluous Liquid Glass removed, and dozens of Apple's apps have received similar updates.

The problem of dictated squircles

Tahoe did not only change Apple's own icons. It also dictated the shape of every third-party app icon, forcing all of them into the same prescribed squircle. Icons that failed to comply were shrunk and imprisoned on an ugly gray background — “icon jail” — to fit Apple's desired aesthetic, and developers redesigned their icons to avoid that fate. After decades of beautiful, memorable Mac icons in varying shapes, Kafasis writes, the platform traded personality for bland uniformity.

Distinct shapes are a usability feature

Past icons were not just more expressive, they were easier to use: distinct shapes helped tell them apart at a glance. Tahoe removes that cue and leaves colour as the primary differentiator, which fails for people with colour vision deficiency — or simply for apps with similar palettes. Kafasis points at Slack and Photos, which he now has to examine closely to tell apart. He also notes that the new “Clear” and “Tinted” icon styles introduced in Tahoe are seeing little uptake; Adam Engst wrote that identifying a particular app when all icons are clear or tinted squircles is “nearly impossible”.

No technical reason for the ban

There is no technical obstacle to allowing a variety of shapes, Kafasis argues, and Apple has already shown it can correct course: the Golden Gate icon refinements and the Liquid Glass opacity slider were both welcomed. He filed the request internally as feedback FB23388490 — “Third-Party App Icons Should Not Be Restricted to Apple's Dictated Squircle Shape” — and suspects it is a duplicate many times over. His conclusion is simple: let icons take on a wide variety of shapes once more.