Cute site. It doesn't change the fact that the iOS icon standard is terrible, though. (It defeats the human visual system's attempts to recognize objects by silhouettes, which is why so many people take so long to find the icon they are looking for).
I wonder if the reason is that idiots will fill the whole available area anyway. Is Apple that afraid of bad designers?
Ony my HTC One X, PlayBook and Mac, the builtin icons are gorgeous and have interesting silhouettes. But if I look at any of the three attached App Stores, 3rd party vendors are desparate to fill the whole area with details.
The medicine category in the Mac App Store is a pretty good example of it. Most icon are either a solid block that will ruin your Dock's aesthetics, or a circle. I wish Apple would reject them all, but I can imagine the media response to that.
Eh I think it's more of a brand choice. They've pretty much cornered the market with the rounded square. Anytime I see that, I think of an app icon.
That and standardizing the white space between apps. It looks cleaner to me than looking at a bunch of different sized silhouettes. Yes, it might be less efficient, but I'd prefer the overall aesthetic over the half second I potentially lost.
With simple icons, like the Phone app, the background is not overly distracting. Unfortunately many apps believe they need to fill the entire icon with detail. The YouTube and Notes apps have pictures instead of simple shapes. There is nothing to subconciously recognize so instead I must interpret the picture and conciously map that to the name and purpose of the app.
Apple could have used spacial awareness to help us recognize apps. Unfortunately iOS messes this up too, the home button can take me to any of my app screens. So I need to get my bearings before hunting for my app.
We are left with just color and patterns to differentiate icons. This makes the task of recognizing apps much more difficult purely so the phones look nice in store.
It seems likely from your reply that you have no education in matters related to vision. The human visual system uses other things too, yes, but silhouettes are one of the most dominant features because they are most invariant to lighting conditions. (Think about what would happen if you mostly depended on color, but now you are walking around at night when humans have poor color discrimination).
