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Didn't they get rid of square icons very recently? I feel like the Android app store is trying to explicitly make small apps look old by updated the format every couple weeks.

The only apps that look right on your screen are the ones that have a dedicated mobile graphics department...

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I was super confused too--to this day I get annoyed when I see apps that never updated their icons to circles, rendered as a square-in-a-circle with >50% whitespace. And now less than a year later, we're going back to squares??

But looking more closely, it seems like this is for Play Store icons, not the APK icons on your phone. Which makes me go... meh, whatever.

That's another thing that wasn't clear. Those old legacy icons that do match these new squares by happenstance, are they also going to be shrunk and hovered in an identical square or will we be able to see the full icon again?

Also why are we trying to make all these icon borders the same in the first place? The silhouette is one of the first things our brain sees and processes; that's why it's such an important part to pay attention to in art. Making it all the same makes it that much more difficult to differentiate the icons from one another, which frustrates me as a user.

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