Daring Fireball writer John Gruber has renewed his criticism of Apple’s push toward iOS-style rounded-square app icons on macOS, arguing that the Mac’s interface uses icons as richer objects than the iPhone home screen does.
The exchange began after Tobias Steinke asked on Mastodon why the rounded-square shape was acceptable on iOS and iPadOS but objectionable on macOS. Gruber answered Wednesday that the platforms have different interaction models, and that importing iOS constraints to the Mac can make the desktop worse rather than more consistent.
Gruber’s term for the design constraint is “squircle jail,” meaning a requirement that app icons fit inside the rounded-square shape associated with iPhone and iPad apps. He said he does not think the rule is ideal on iOS either, but noted that iPhone app icons have used that shape since Apple introduced the iPhone in January 2007. In his view, Apple did not remove an earlier tradition of free-form icon silhouettes from iOS because that tradition was never there.
The Mac is different, Gruber argued. On iOS, home screen icons mostly work as single-tap launch targets. On macOS, users can select icons, double-click them, drag them, move them, and drop files onto them. That makes the icon less like a button and more like a manipulable desktop object. A single container shape, he said, removes one of the signals users can rely on when scanning a screen.
Gruber pointed to Apple’s own older design guidance to support the argument. A 2018 version of Apple’s Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines, preserved by the Internet Archive, told developers to consider giving Mac app icons “a realistic, unique shape.” The same guidance said a distinctive outline could make an icon easier to recognize quickly, and advised developers to avoid the rounded rectangle shape associated with iOS app icons.
That citation is the sharp bit. Apple was not merely tolerating irregular Mac icons in 2018, according to the archived guideline. It was teaching developers that silhouette helped recognition. Gruber framed the later move toward a more unified Apple Human Interface Guidelines document, with platform-specific notes rather than separate platform manuals, as evidence that Apple has blurred distinctions its own design teams once treated as meaningful.
He also put icon shape in a broader list of iOS conventions that he says would fit poorly on the Mac. His examples included hidden scroll bars, which he said may make sense on small touch screens but not on desktop displays, along with more extreme hypotheticals such as removing AppKit, cutting off the Unix terminal layer, or forcing all Mac software through the App Store.
Gruber’s case is ultimately about platform boundaries, not nostalgia for glossy icons. He cited four decades of Macintosh icon history and older Apple guidance, including the 2002 Aqua Human Interface Guidelines, as evidence that Mac icon design had its own logic: object-like symbols, varied outlines, and more room for visual specificity. Apple’s current direction, as Gruber describes it, trades that vocabulary for uniformity borrowed from a touch-first system.
This story draws on original reporting from Daring Fireball.
