I hate these icons

It's not even more aesthetic. Just more unified in branding.
- And the interface of their apps are still incoherent af. I don't know how, but they manage to make things worse every time
  
  It's ok, they'll just retire the service eventually.
- Yeah, the old logos were all over the place. At first glance it’s not obvious they’re all Google apps.
  
  And? All of those being part of the same walled garden is a bug in the legal system not a feature.
  
  To me, that's just the case for camera and calendar. Maps is IMHO perfect (except the unnecessary G) and the red-and-white envelope is quite well-known.
- I think what really bothers me about the aesthetics is that the shapes are broken up by the coloration. For example, the pin icon for Google Maps looks almost like a hook, because the yellow has little contrast on this white background.
- And that’s why I don’t really hate it. I hate Google, but I think it’s a neat design choice. I still hate Microsoft’s icon design a lot though, they can’t seem to stick with one thing.
- I definitely find it more aesthetically pleasing. Just like the icon packs.
- Whatever. It sucks ass is the point.
  
  My point is that it's also ugly.

i think they did need to unify the design and branding but i also agree they went too far with it. if they had only chosen 1-2 colors for each app icon that would have helped a lot.
gmail - red
drive - yellow
maps - green
meet - blue
calendar - lighter blue
problem solved
- Problem solved! If we ignore the world's ~300 million colorblind people.
  
  i think they forgot to mention: they're not all the same shape.
  
  The icons would still have different shapes, right?
  
  Most software pretty much doesn’t give a fuck about the visually impaired despite everyone talking big shit about accessibility. So I could certainly give a fuck what color someone’s logo is.
  
  then what is your solution? do you expect them to redo their entire corporate branding palette?
- calendar - lighter blue
  It's called goluboy. In Russian at least.

I wouldn't even call this "aesthetics". Rather "conceptual homogeneity" or something like that. It's what happens when you strive for a uniform look over a useful or visually pleasing one.
- Even uniformity can be aesthetically pleasing, but these icons are decidedly not.
- In some countries uniform look at least provided good for society. In this case it provides only profits for to 1%.
  Good for society:

The homogenization of these icons has been a long source of consternation for me.
They're barely functional as icons; you can scroll right by them and miss them; which makes finding the apps in a list of apps a bit annoying sometimes. Removing each icon's unique color scheme and replacing it with the 'company 4 colors' was the stupidest fucking idea ever.
Even more infuriating is how they keep renaming the applications to unexpected things every so often; so they move around; and it's dreadfully annoying to remember if they prefixed the name of the app with a G or something else completely different, which renders strict alphabetical sorting a bit moot.
- It can get even worse. My phone lets me do this to my icons which is ridiculous. I think this was opt-in but now that I'm going through my settings again I can't actually figure out how to turn it off lol
  
  Long press the homescreen, wallpaper and style, themed icons
  
  This is Material You icons; and this is basically not something you can opt out of...that I know of. You may want to find a different Launcher that allows you to load icon packs or disable that Material You behavior. (If yours doesn't)
- Just had to comment on your elegance and class good sir. Carry on!
  
  Pardon; but I do happen to be a lady; thank you.

I keep all my Google icons quarantined in one folder. Case in point:
- I use nova launcher. It allows you to replace any app icon by any png file. So you can download the old icons from the internet and use them on your phone. It's a lot of work and I agree Google shouldn't have done this, but at least you can revert it if you want to put in the effort.
  
  I also use Nova Launcher and had no idea you could do that! Thanks for letting me know.
- Lol at the Photos icon. How does that in any way represent a photo or a camera? I guess it's an iris shutter but that's not something you notice too often on a real-life camera.
  
  I think it was flower at some point.
  
  I can't find photos on my phone without reading and I couldn't find it in there either. I always click camera then go to photos from there.
- Ugh… feels dirty to even have most of those apps installed.
  Of those I have Gmail, Translate, and YouTube. I would get rid of those if got decent iOS alternatives.
- Yep, same here

Plus the art they started using in gdrive. The art on its own is cool but within the Google ecosystem just feels like… what is it even… why… ugh I hate it.
- Corporate Memphis. It's an art style a lot of people hate, and I can understand why.
  
  soulless corps trying to seem friendly, that's why
  
  I've recognized this style as a generic corpo art, but never had a name to put to it. Thanks for that.
  Sanitized, pandering, and insincere, Wikipedia describes it perfectly.
  
  Yeah like in 50 years I can absolutely imagine people loving it as a style of a time. I recognize I like pop art far more than I would if I was in its target demographic. But also I don’t hate it, it’s just so everywhere and so soulless. It’s the style of “money please” in a time of great socioeconomic inequality. It’s art deco but demanding friendship and comfort rather than respect and awe. But more than anything it’s art for business people, and I just don’t care for business people.
  
  Corporate Memphis
  Link for the lazy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Memphis
- I am actually quite fond of this style, though this might be controversial
- prevent body shaming by only showing obese/disfigured people so society accepts it as a healthy norm
  
  Corporate memphis does incorporate a sort of identity vagueness.
  Almost all human features, body, skincolor are in a uncanny valley. Non-personal enough to be general yet similar enough to be relatable to pretty much any theoretical demographic.
  In reality it falls flat. Many people (non partisan) dislike it because of how artificial and shallow it feels.
  What it is definitely not is a deep plot to change the social perception of checks note people with non idealistic body features.
  Google has no economic incentive to improve your opinion of disabled people who are equally part of this group you appear to find non acceptable to exist in the workforce.
  
  Slow down there, Dr. Gall…

Triumph of visual design over interactive design. These days, most “designers” only care about graphics visually. The much deeper science of how people use and understand things is beyond them. Worse, they think the problem is that everybody else does not “get” visual design.
Style over substance.
- Case in point: Every single thing Microsoft is doing in Windows these days.
- Worse, they think the problem is that everybody else does not “get” visual design.
  This means they didn't even make good design. Another example is KDE vs GNOME.
  KDE: "We just did system we wanted."
  GNOME: "No, you don't get it, this is design!"

[It could be sooo easy to solve, but noooo...
- Without the distracting colors, now I can see this says MAPOD

People simultaneously justifying their jobs but not willing to make significant, meaningful changes

Since Gmail doesn't have the obvoious envelope anymore I often open it when I want to open Maps. My brain ist like "M for Maps".

Not Google related, but whoever decide that the best color scheme for an Office suite should be light grey text on a white background deserves to be flogged.

I actually think these are fine. If I can quickly recognise each on my homescreen (I don't use labels) then it's fine, and I've never had a problem with any of these.
I like it because each company each has its own set of apps, and they have somewhat unified app icons.
Proton is the same, which similar icons as google but with their own unified branding.
I like it, personally.

What would happen if people deserted Google products in droves?
Mail:
Vivaldi mail
Android client: K-9 Mail
Desktop client: Betterbird
Cloud:
Mega [referral URL]
Maps:
Organic Maps
Meet:
Matrix
Calendar:
Vivaldi calendar, syncable with a myriad of clients.
Here's an exhaustive list of Mostly excellent “free” software that I use.
Please also consider supporting the myriad of developers who offer their superior products for free, open source, without ads.
“What if I paid for all my free software?
I've always felt guilty by taking for granted the rare breed of virtuous humans that provide free excellent software without relying on advertising. Let's change that and pay, how much would I “lose” anyway?” —https://www.cynicusrex.com/file/takemymoney.html
- Matrix is general-purpose chat. Meet will be replaced with Jitsi.
  Also why not nextcloud for storage on someone else's computer.
- Not a fan of Vivaldi, but that's the spirit.
- Why not use Keybase for cloud and proton for mail?
  
  I dropped all their services as soon as Proton promoted crypto"currencies", i.e., multi-level marketing pyramid schemes.
  Haven't tried Keybase yet.
- Mega is shit
  
  Sorry but no, MEGA is good. It's consistently rated among the best for privacy, performance and price. Imho Proton Drive is the best and most promising though.

Anyone else this there's actually nothing at all wrong with the "New" row of icons? Except for the triangle one, which is terrible in its "Original" version as well, as it indicates absolutely nothing about its app (I believe it's Google Drive, right?). All the rest are clearly distinguishable, and have relevance to what the app does.
- The Google drive logo is even worse when you compare it to the play store logo which is also a triangle. I mix them up all the time
- I’m mad that the Gmail icon is no longer an envelope, but other than that they’re fine.

I filed a very irritated Radar / Feedback (Apple's terms for bug reports) with Apple when the icons for apps all turned to rounded squares. I compared them to Google's icons and challenged them on making everything harder to distinguish.
I hate contemporary GUI design. Not all of it, but probably half.

What I see:
💩 💩 💩 💩 💩

What's the font used in the heading? Is it some flavour of Helvetica?
- It certainly looks a lot like Helvetica. Probably could be any of these Helvetica clones:
  I will also say that it feels a lot like Inter to me, which it's not as the i-dots aren't round, but maybe you'll enjoy that one anyways...
- It does not seem to have consistent kerning.
- Man... I might be showing my age, but checking out some of the links in these replies gave me nostalgia for the website FontsnThings.com (or was it "FontsandThings"?). I used to love browsing that shit as a kid and downloading all the coolest looking fonts lol
  Anyone else?
- Probably Roboto.
- My wife really really really wanted a MacBook in 2020 and the major plus of having it is that I got to steal all the fonts. Mostly, I just wanted Helvetica lol
- Grotesk maybe. The curve of "h" doesn't seem to go high enough. Otherwise pretty close.

- Bro what
  
  Damn, my 30s flew by if 2020 was 10 years ago
  
  Ok so for me it's the 2012 maps logo, the 2013 gmail and the 2015 calendar logo.

I'll keep using my favorite icon pack instead, thank you very much
- which do you use ? i am looking for a good one
  
  Poppin, Olympia, Cyber, Minima and/or Outline, depending on the mood, season and launcher. There isn't much left on factory spec with my phone.
  
  I use Flat Circle. It's not free, though.

There's always a yoyo effect with design. I fully expect Google to swing back to gothic palette and highly detailed icon within the next decade.

What I keep seeing: $ $ $ $ $
Also I'm sure the designs are absolutely as humanly possible adapted to perfectly achieve their goal. Too much money, people, and time involved for this not to be the case.
And the goal was never ease of use, that doesn't bring in any more money when you have a monopoly. Engagement & forced ads do.
\ (By 'forced ads' in this case I do not mean directly advertising a specific product, but forcing you to pause your thoughts to specifically and consciously think about Google making the name/brand ever more part of your actual life and as such its shitty behaviour gets normalised, even trusted - thats just how our brains work even when we think otherwise ... and I hope we all think of Google as a curse on humanity.)

Hey show some respect! A whole team of people each racked up tens of thousands of dollars of student loan debt and spent months tweaking their designs, just for upper management to wreck it all on a whim in order to get you those new icons.

Remember way back when, when you could set icons to be whatever you want?
- oh yeah, everything is a pirate ship!

I use an icon pack on Android to revert them to their previous icon, the new ones are indeed terrible..

I was yelling about how windows 11 swapped out text listingzs for copy, paste, etc from its contextual menus for stupid icons just the other day. Modern UIs are becoming so “streamlined” to the point of uselessness.

I just stopped using most of them
- I stopped a time ago. Interestingly, the thing I miss most is maps. That sheer amount of user data paves the path for a fine traffic estimation.
  
  Maps is indeed the odd one out. I'm trying to switch to magic earth, but it's not as good yet.

The absolute worst is the idiotic "let's make all app icons the same shape" thing.

I don't love the difficulty of extremely fast individual identification but there is something to be said for the ease of extremely fast collective identification, it makes it very easy to see which group of apps each app belongs to, which is also valuable.
- Except this is not "browsers" group or "email clients" group, this is "vertical monopoly" group.

Custom icon packs for the win!

I like the new version of the last two, but old for the rest
- The camera app and spreadsheet app? Because that's what i would've guessed they were based on the icons
  
  those are Meet and Calendar.

I feel like it's easier to use the monochrome mode of the phone than these icons

Its one of those things u never think about as a person without disabilities, cuz i can tell the difference just fine, i guess they should have consulted someone with a vision impairment when considering stuff like this.

On top of that in Play store lots of times when I search for certain app it gives me like 10 more alternatives that all have slightly different logo but all use that same yellow-green-blue-red color palette that google has, so with all these copycats it's even harder to figure out whether app is from google or not

I think the maps actually looks more distinctive because of the shape. The rest are worse to differentiate though.

Color is the first thing the eyes tend to notice, then shape, then lines and details. The new icons all look the same at the edge of my vision, I have to look at them straight on to distinguish them. Individually each one is fine but together, like what the hell?
I don't rawdog Google icons anymore anyway, I use an icon pack

i see the new icons wanna intergrate googles colors ngl

Yeah this is the worst! You know a few designers raised this exact problem during review, too, and were shut down

One more reason to uninstall these app

For mostly all of my app-launching things I always prefer searching for text than searching for an icon. In pixel launcher, I always use the app drawer search, but an even better solution is in something like Niagara launcher.
- KISS launcher is also good: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/fr.neamar.kiss/

Uh, are you geometrically dyslexic?
- Yeah these icons are all distinctive
  
  Oh yeah it's easy to confuse an envelope for a bulbous pin if they're the same color. I nearly mailed a letter in a turkey baster the other day so I get it

What do you mean, the new ones are still different shapes.

To be honest the maps and the meets icons look better

oh noooo icons sharing a common design language and color scheme? the absolute horror.
if you can't tell the difference between these icons i have a great educational resource for you
- nah I still recognized all of them as google products bc they use the same 4 colors, but in different interesting ways. gmail was all red but a letter shape. Maps was a red pinhead. drive was a triangle but used all the colors but red. Calendar was a less noticeable shape but instantly recognizeable as a tabletop day calendar. now everything has to use all 4 colors and the shapes are so small that the colors can't do enough on a phone screen to differentiate themselves.
  They already had a common design language and color scheme. Now they have a samey-ness to them that takes away visual interest.
- Try harder, you can do better than this.