Marco Arment

What you want, what you need, is for those icons to be very different from each other so that you can quickly and easily visually locate the app you are looking for and distinguish it from other similar apps.

Now, when companies do this thing where all of our things need to look similar, you know, all the big tech companies do this.

Google does this with all their rainbow icons that all look exactly the same.

You know, Adobe has all their weird, like, you know, letter icons for the Creative Suite apps, which this is obviously trying to rip off.

Like...

the big companies all do this they make all their apps look the same and they are serving their own goal of uniformity and that again i don't think users are asking for that first of all or really benefit much from that it's in the same way that like you know apple has always in in the in the modern era apple has talked to and johnny i've talked about like unifying the platform so that you have a consistent user interface across the mac and the iphone and the ipad and like

That often does not serve those platforms or their users.

It's one of those things that to a designer or to a company's marketing and branding teams, those sound really good.

It sounds good to have a unified, consistent style.

But in most cases, the results of that suck in some unnecessary ways.

And I wish they would...

eventually maybe realize that and like and there's a time and a place for consistent branding but i think all of your icons and all of your uis are not necessarily that place because what it actually does is make the icons work worse at one of their most important jobs

no wait is this but aren't is this liquid glass icons where like if you have a light mode home screen they will have light backgrounds i don't know because i haven't like it's not out yet so i haven't run them i don't actually know how opaque they are but in in their in the media literature they've they've provided i think steve tratt and smith dug up some screenshots from some videos where like somebody had a light mode dock and they were showing like they do have so i think for now let's assume that they're that they actually might color shift um with different themes

I think it's, I mean, it mostly doesn't affect me because it's, I mean, it's a bunch of apps that I mostly don't use.

But I think anything that makes these apps more accessible to people with small budgets is better.

And this does that.

Like, you know, before, you know, you had situations like, you know, oh, you'd have to buy Final Cut Express.

You'd have to buy the small version or use some free tools or use some tools that are not like what the pros are using.

Or, you know, back in our day, just pirate all the big tools.

But I think it's harder now.