Rogue Amoeba to Apple: Let Mac App Icons Have Shapes Again

macOS 26 (Tahoe) forced every app icon — Apple’s own and third-party alike — into a single prescribed squircle, shrinking any non-conforming icon into an ugly gray-backgrounded box. Rogue Amoeba’s Paul Kafasis argues this traded decades of distinctive, memorable Mac icon design for bland uniformity, and made the desktop measurably harder to use. With shape eliminated as a distinguishing cue, color becomes the only way to tell icons apart at a glance, which breaks down for users with color vision deficiency or simply apps with similar palettes (he singles out Slack and Photos).

The piece frames this against signs that Apple is already reversing course on its Liquid Glass missteps. The first betas of macOS 27 (Golden Gate) sharpen dozens of first-party icons and strip out gratuitous glass effects, and Apple added a Liquid Glass opacity slider — evidence that people inside the company both recognize the mistakes and have the authority to fix them. Kafasis wants the same correction applied to the squircle mandate.

His core point is that there’s no technical justification for banning icon shapes; it’s purely an aesthetic decree that hurts both usability and creativity. The author notes the related Tinted and Clear icon styles have seen little uptake precisely because uniform, shapeless icons become nearly impossible to identify. The ask, filed as feedback FB23388490, is simple: stop forcing every icon into the same shape and let developers design distinctive icons again.