Apple’s App Icon HOA

Louie Mantia has a great post about how app icons are converging towards the squircle on iOS and macOS. His post reads like a history. If you’re wondering, “How did we get to a place where all app icons are becoming squircles?” Mantia’s post answers that question by starting at the beginning. It’s hard to walk away from Mantia’s article without a sense of empathy for Apple’s position, like “Oh ok, I get why they’re doing what they’re doing. It makes sense.” Apple’s direction is kind of a tacit acknowledgement to how most people are shipping app icons. Apple is “paving the cowpaths” as it were, because most app icons are just brand logos. Nowadays, it’s these bland, big-business logo icons that make up a good chunk of iOS Home Screens and macOS Docks, instead of the beautiful, illustrative app icons that used to dominate our devices. So many app icons are just logos in a squircle, so Apple made tools like the Icon Composer and glass effects to help make that approach look good by…