Summary
- Spotify rolled out a subtle change to its Android icon today.
- It does away with the app’s black bezel, leaving more of your home screen filled with nothing but green.
- Boy, does it hurt my eyes to look at.
Your home screen on Android is a sacred place. At minimum, you’ve ensured all of your most essential apps are within arm’s thumb’s reach. You’ve considered how many home pages feel right to your smartphone experience. Maybe you’ve kept some apps off your home screen, no matter how important they are, because they don’t support Material You. So when something changes on your home screen, it can feel like your world is upside down. That’s how I felt this morning when Spotify’s update app icon appeared in my dock, sans bezel — a complete assault on my senses.
Okay, I’m being a little overdramatic. But in the process of swapping back from the Moto G Stylus 5G (of which you can read my review right now) back to the Pixel 8a, I realized Spotify had refreshed its app icon to better match how it appears on desktop. Unlike its previous iteration, which featured a black ring around the green icon, this new one removes the bezel altogether. It effectively makes the entire logo feel larger, and thanks to Spotify’s very specific, borderline-radioactive shade of green, it’s also far more likely to draw your eye to wherever it’s pinned on your home screen.
From left to right, Spotify’s new icon, Spotify’s new icon in two dynamic themes, and Spotify’s old icon.
It’s the little changes that matter on Android
I doubt my experience will be universal here — if anything, some people might prefer the synergy between this icon and the one used on Windows — but to my eyes, there’s just something off about it. It’s difficult to see in screenshots, but the specific levels of saturation used on the Pixel 8a’s display just makes this shade of green difficult to look at without feeling like your eyes are being poked at, a feeling that the previous black bezel managed to subdue.
It’s also made worse by enabling dynamic themes. While most applications use darker icons on lighter backdrops, Spotify flips this, making its icon darker and the three lines within lighter (the opposite is true in dark mode). The result is, no matter how you have your Android home screen laid out, Spotify’s icon sticks out among the rest of your apps. It’s either an eye-catching shade of green without a break between it and your wallpaper, or a mismatched pair of colors compared to the rest of your Material You-supported icons.
Is this something to get up in arms about? No, of course not — frankly, I’ll probably stop noticing it within a few day’s time. But it’s a perfect example of how, when even the slightest things change on your home screen, it can feel like someone’s rearranging the furniture in your home. Even if you grow used to the changes, it doesn’t feel like you had much say in the matter. Fortunately, third-party app launchers can help bring things back to normal, though those too have their fair share of downsides. In the meantime, I’ll keep hoping Google eventually adds support for custom icons on its default Pixel launcher.
