
A new Google Play app and game icon specification - ingve
https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2019/03/introducing-new-google-play-app-and.html
======
Andrew_nenakhov
Adaptive icons is a stupid bad idea. Humans distinguish different objects by
shape and color. Now when all objects are mandatory made to have same shape,
it only made harder to find needed icon. It effectively just made icons
smaller and harder to distinguish from one another.

Best Android icons were in Android 5.0, and went downhill from that.

~~~
sfRattan
When I picked up a new phone last fall, this change made me irrationally
angry. Now everything looks like a little piece of candy and not like an icon.
Designs proceed further and further toward abstraction to the point that,
without a lot of contextual knowledge, it can be hard to tell what they
represent or if they even represent anything.

Maybe I'm just being curmudgeonly, but I think icon design went downhill in
about the mid-nineties. Classic Mac OS and Windows 95 haven't really been
bested in terms of icon design clarity... and don't get me started about the
loss of the Classic Mac OS Finder and its purely spatial metaphor. Not all
design work is progress.

------
SQueeeeeL
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...

~~~
Ivoirians
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.

~~~
tomatotomato37
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.

------
jessemillar
From the standpoint of a designer, this will likely simplify asset development
pipelines since the new spec appears to be much closer to the iOS guidelines.

------
freehunter
As someone who has some apps on both stores but doesn't have a dedicated team
working on app store listings, I often find myself wondering why Google and
Apple, two of the biggest tech companies in the world who created these
platforms, stores, and the associated technologies completely from scratch,
can't help me out just a little bit on icons and screenshots.

It's an absolute nightmare to develop on an iPhone X and try to get
screenshots onto the store. You're required to have 5.5" screenshots, which
means an iPhone 8 Plus. The guidelines specifically say your app has to be
designed to work on all screen sizes, but I can't submit screenshots taken on
my iPhone X or XS and submit them to the store. I have to resize them, which
means cutting off the top and bottom to make it wide enough to fit the
resolution of the iPhone 8 Plus. Apple, a genius of a tech company, cannot
figure out how to display screenshots from an iPhone X on an iPhone 8, but
they can show iPhone 8 screenshots on an iPhone X. My app is location-based,
so screenshots have to be taken on-site... but I don't own an iPhone 8 Plus. I
own an iPhone XS and an iPhone 8. But I can't use the screenshots from either
without editing them to chop off the top and bottom.

Google gets it a bit better in that you can upload any screenshots you want of
any size or resolution, but they require a separate icon upload. And while
Apple's icons need to be 1024x1024, Google needs them to be exactly 512x512.
Again, a genius tech company cannot figure out on their own website how to
resize an image before it gets saved.

Not to mention Apple wants promo videos in portrait mode, even though iMovie
does not support portrait mode videos. But Google wants your promos hosted on
Youtube, which prefers landscape videos. So now every promo has to be shot and
edited twice.

Changing from a round icon to a square icon is the least of my worries.

~~~
hgjwq
Why don't you use the iPhone Simulator to take the screenshots at different
screen sizes?

In my case they've never rejected the screenshots for having done that (and it
clearly shows you've used the Simulator: they have "Carrier" as the carrier
name).

~~~
freehunter
My app is location based, so either I have to edit my screenshots while I'm
on-location or I have to edit my code to spoof my location. Either way it's
extra work for me that could easily be handled on Apple's side

~~~
tqkxzugoaupvwqr
You can set the location in the simulator.

~~~
freehunter
Holy shit I've wasted so much time.

So why does Apple make me submit a video of my app working in the real world
if they can just spoof the location from their end?

------
heavymark
Glad to see them moving to iOS design guidelines roughly. I imagine originally
they had to choose something different to avoid copying, but glad that is now
less of concern.

------
kaetemi
All designers tell me that silhouettes are the most important defining trait
of a design.

------
joelthelion
Just what the world needed /s

