At WWDC 2018, Apple Senior Vice President of Software Engineering Craig Federighi asked, "Are you merging iOS and macOS?" This rhetorical question was presumably in response to widespread criticism. Federighi's rhetorical answer was, "No. Of course not."
Yet seven years later at WWDC 2025, Apple's plans appear more transparent than ever (yes, that's a pun about Liquid Glass): the critics were correct that iOS and macOS are merging. The latest evidence of this merger is the appearance of app icons in the macOS 26 Tahoe developer beta. All Mac app icons are now forced into iOS-style squircles. This change affects not only Apple's own apps but also third-party apps; if an app icon is not already a squircle, macOS automatically draws it inside a gray squircle. Here's the venerable BBEdit:
The automatic squircling on macOS Tahoe is enforced in Finder, in open panels, and even in Safari Extensions Settings:
The macOS Tahoe app icon squircling is a pain and a cost for indie developers like me and the others shown above. I'm not a professional designer, so I have to pay one whenever I need a new app icon. (Lately my designer has been Matthew Skiles.) In some cases, that's not worth the investment. For example, Bonjeff is a free, open source app, so I don't want to pay anything; indeed the current app icon was donated to the project. My app Underpass was discontinued and removed from the App Store almost four years ago due to very low sales, as well as some OS changes by Apple; however, I still use the app myself, and perhaps some previous customers do too. The non-Pro version of StopTheMadness is now obsolete and has been superseded by StopTheMadness Pro, so I'm definitely not going to make a new icon for the old app. And although I'm committed to supporting StopTheScript into the future, its App Store sales are unfortunately pretty low, so I'm reluctant to spend more money on it.
And then there's Finder:
Let that be our last battlefield.
The most bizarre phenomenon on Tahoe, though, is that newer app icons are automatically applied to older apps. I can see this on my Mac mini, which has four boot volumes installed, going back to macOS 12 Mojave. Here's Xcode version 14.2, showing the app icon for the new Xcode version 26.0 beta:
I suspect that the Launch Services framework on Tahoe is looking up the app icon by the bundle identifier of the app, which is identical for the new and old versions of Xcode.
Let's ask Apple again, are you merging iOS and macOS? Well, look at the new Icon & widget style in macOS Tahoe Appearance System Settings (an app which infamously was redesigned based on iOS Settings—and don't even get me started on the new Xcode 26 Settings window):
Does that look familiar? But don't worry, the changes in macOS Tahoe are all worth it, because now you can make your Dock do this:
