It’s like when safe area insets appeared in iOS 11: it wasn’t clear why you needed them until the iPhone X came along with a notch and a home indicator. And then it changed everything.

There has also been an emphasis on “concentricity”. It’s an impossible thing to achieve and an easy target for ridicule. But it’s another case where Apple wants to take control of the UI elements that intersect with the physical hardware. All of this makes me think that Apple is close to introducing devices where the screen disappears seamlessly into the physical edge. Something where flexible OLED blurs the distinction between pixels and bezel. A new “wraparound” screen with safe area insets on the vertical edges of the device, just like we saw with the horizontal edges on iPhone X.

Other challenges, like infusing your own branding into an app with clear buttons will be easier to reason about once the reality of the hardware drops. Until then, stay away from the edges and wait for Apple to reveal the real reason for Liquid Glass.

I’m pretty sure that if you were to interview one of the designers at Apple responsible for this icon devolution, they would say something about reducing icons to their essence. To me, this looks more like squeezing all life out of them. Icons in Mac OS X used to be inventive, well crafted, distinctive, with a touch of fun and personality. Mac OS X’s user interface was sober, utilitarian, intuitive, peppered by descriptive icons that made the user experience fun without signalling ‘this is a kid’s toy’.

Not only is this the recipe for blandness, it’s also borderline contradictory. Like, Make a unique dish using a minimal number of simple ingredients. While it’s possible to make a few different dishes using just two or three things, you touch the ceiling of uniqueness and variety pretty damn soon.

The language in the current guidelines for app icons isn’t much different. It also reflects Apple’s current philosophy of ‘keeping it simple’ which, out of context, could be valid design advice — you’re designing icons with small-ish dimensions, not full-page detailed illustrations for a book, so striving for simplicity isn’t a bad thing. And yet — and I might be wrong here — I keep reading between the lines and feel that these guidelines are more concerned with ensuring that developers maintain the same level of blandness and unimaginativeness of Apple’s own redesigned app icons: