iMessage sent vs. received ratio (1)

For those of you who aren’t terminally online, you likely missed Apple’s keynote event yesterday at WWDC. They unveiled all the big changes coming to iOS 18 in September at the event. Design Twitter was in an uproar because you can customize your icon color.

If designers talked to anyone besides other designers, they’d quickly realize most teenagers have already hacked together a solution to customize their icons with shortcuts. Android has supported this functionality for years, so it’s not a new feature.

This outcry got me thinking about visual customization more broadly. I asked myself, what would it look like if we took this a step further and allowed a user to customize the visual style of their app icons? You can imagine a world where someone sets the border radius of all of their icons to 0px. This would upset designers everywhere, but if the user is happy, who cares?

I don’t have much time or mental energy to care about app icon customization. I understand why they support it (users already do this with extra steps), though the initial designs shared in the keynote were visually underwhelming. Regardless, it seems we are moving towards a more customizable world, whether designers like it or not).

Have a friend who is 100% going to customize their phone? Send them this newsletter.

https://sorens.beehiiv.com/