Daring Fireball’s John Gruber has turned a complaint about rounded-square app icons into a broader argument about how Apple treats the Mac: as a platform with its own rules, or as a larger iPad with a better keyboard.
Gruber was responding to Tobias Steinke, who asked on Mastodon why iOS and iPadOS app icons have long used the same rounded-square shape without drawing the same objection. Gruber’s answer is that the history and mechanics of the Mac are different, and that Apple’s own design guidance used to say so plainly.
The dispute centers on what Gruber calls “squircle jail,” a requirement or design direction that forces macOS app icons into the rounded rectangle shape associated with iPhone and iPad apps. He argues that the constraint is not catastrophic for the Mac, but that it removes a useful part of the platform’s visual language.
The Mac icon is not just a launch button
Gruber’s distinction is functional. On iOS, he says, home screen icons are mostly one-tap launch targets, which helps explain why Apple has used rounded-square icons on the iPhone since its 2007 introduction. On macOS, he argues, icons do more work: users can select them, drag them, move them around, double-click them, and drop files onto them.
That extra behavior matters because shape helps users recognize objects quickly. Gruber points to the Mac’s long icon tradition, where apps often used distinctive silhouettes rather than a uniform tile. His argument is less about nostalgia than about affordance, the boring design word for “can a person tell what this thing is and what it does without squinting at a label?”
The awkward exhibit for Apple is Apple’s own documentation. Gruber cites the 2018 macOS Human Interface Guidelines, preserved by the Internet Archive, which advised developers to consider realistic, distinctive shapes for app icons. The same guidance said a unique outline could make an icon easier to spot quickly, and told developers to avoid the rounded rectangle associated with iOS app icons.
That is a fairly direct collision with any push to make Mac icons look more like iOS icons. Apple’s older guidance treated platform differences as design constraints worth preserving. Gruber says the current Apple Human Interface Guidelines have since been consolidated into one document with platform-specific side notes, rather than separate guides for each platform.
One Apple, several interfaces
Gruber also lists other iOS conventions he thinks would be bad fits for the Mac, including hidden scroll bars, eliminating AppKit, removing the Unix terminal layer, or requiring all Mac apps to come from the App Store. Those are his examples, not announced Apple policies in this piece.
His broader claim is that design consistency across Apple platforms can become design flattening when it ignores what each device is for. iOS began with finger-sized targets on a small touchscreen. The Mac grew up around a pointer, files, windows, drag-and-drop, and a much denser working environment.
Apple has not made a fresh statement in Gruber’s piece about why it prefers more uniform icon shapes, and the piece does not establish whether a new technical enforcement mechanism is coming. What it does show is that Apple once told Mac developers almost the opposite of what Gruber says the company now encourages.
For Mac users and developers, the fight is not only whether rounded rectangles look bland. It is whether macOS still gets to keep design conventions that exist because the Mac works differently.
This story draws on original reporting from Daring Fireball.