Parakeet Blog: The Shape of Apps

The Shape of Apps

July 15, 2026 • Louie Mantia

While icons on iOS (formerly iPhoneOS) have always been rounded squares, and rounded-square icons have existed on Apple platforms for over 20 years now, Mac app icons have historically exhibited a variety of unique silhouettes, which helped identification alongside other visual tools like color, lighting, and dimensionality.

Because app icons from the Mac OS X era are so beloved, it’s very understandable—relatable even—how mandating rounded square app icons is downright heartbreaking to long-time Mac OS X users.

What happened? Why did this happen? And what should we do?

Breaking Boundaries

When introducing macOS Big Sur to developers, Apple specifically cited the rich history of Mac app icons. They encouraged rounded-square app icons to harmonize more closely with iOS, but without a hard restriction. In fact, some of Apple’s own icons on the platform outright broke the boundary of the squircle, sometimes with a tool that rested on top, like the pen in TextEdit, which was a fun mashup of iOS and macOS.

Six app icons from macOS 11, featuring various methods of extending beyond the expected squircle shape.

While developers have submitted full-bleed square images for iOS app icons since 2008, for these new squircle icons in macOS 11, Apple provided a template to compose app icons in an image editing tool like Photoshop, with full control over the canvas beyond the suggested—but not required—squircle. This template made it easy-ish for designers to compose macOS app icons that were identical to or synonymous with an iOS app icon, while leaving the door open to continue using arbitrarily-shaped app icons on macOS. Icons were saved as an asset catalog.

The macOS 11 app icon Photoshop template.

Spoiler alert: Not everyone used this template. I’m sure people at Apple thought by supplying this template, it would prevent guessing from developers, designers, and companies when figuring out the size and shape of their app icon on macOS.

Thankfully, some designers and developers did use it. What’s more is that some took the opportunity to break the boundary—like Apple did—making app icons that would not be possible on iOS, but still cleverly using the squircle shape.

For example, the left side of this Sketch icon is slightly translucent, mimicking the sidebar appearance. Transmission’s gear-shift handle pokes out the top edge. Keka’s character silhouette approximates the squircle app icon shape organically.

App icons for Sketch, Transmission, and Keka.

And this was great. For a little while.

Squircle Jail

Only five years after macos Big Sur, macOS Tahoe introduced a new app icon style and format, which no longer allows app icons to have arbitrary silhouettes. And as you may already know, app icons that try to do so will go directly to “Squircle Jail.” Also, the squircle shape changed, so all of the pre-Tahoe squircle icons are just slightly off.

From my perspective, there are three versions of Squircle Jail:

A square app icon that does not match the official shape and is therefore masked to the official squircle shape.

A pre-Tahoe app icon that the system scales down and places on a neutral, light-gray squircle background.

An app icon that is voluntarily scaled down and placed on a custom-colored squircle background.

The first of these—more often than not—is a good thing. Examples include third-party apps that have rounded-square icons, but look off. Too large, too small, or a mismatched corner radius. For these cases, the OS scales the square artwork, masks it to the standard squircle app icon shape, and fills in the corners with the same color if necessary. Liquid Glass effects are applied automatically if the foreground and background elements are identified. Nearly every instance of this has a great result.

App icons for Adobe Illustrator, 8BitDo, and PS Remote Play compared to their contained versions from macOS 27.

The second type of Squircle Jail is more controversial, because these app icons were specifically drawn with the intention of fitting in. Overriding that intention feels like punishment for having done the right thing. App icons in a style that was recently encouraged by the system are now scaled down and put inside the squircle as if it were a container. Every icon that was utilizing the previous squircle shape suddenly looks much worse than before.

App icons for Tes, OpenRCT2, and Font Proofer compared to their contained versions from macOS 27.

However, there are many arbitrarily-shaped app icons that were not made with the intention to fit in with recent macOS releases, and these too are scaled down and placed on light-gray squircles. For apps that demonstrate little-to-no familiarity with the system they run on, this doesn’t offend me.

App icons for Steam, BrickLink Studio, and Audacity compared to their contained versions from macOS 27.

The third version of this concept began with Big Sur,...