Status bar icons are boring to be unobtrusive. They have goals directly opposite to the identifiability of most controls. Where they convey information, there’s only a dozen you really expect, instead of the zillion things you can do or install or click on. That’s also why they’re not labeled.

I’m frankly unsure how the hell would you get a Material You icon (actually Adaptive Icon) to have the same low contrast as the safari icon.

… do you understand icons are supposed to contrast with each other? You’re talking about a sea of colored circles, or a sea of uncolored circles, with itty-bitty binary icons. Quite frankly, what the fuck? This is not “agree to disagree” territory. It is objectively awful for the function of these little pictures in an interface.

For god’s sake, even within your iPhone example, with multiple white-on-blue icons, there’s different shades of blue for Apple’s browser and e-mail versus the system settings, and different weights for a giant white envelope versus fine compass engraving, and a red accent for the needle. And your criticism of these is to nitpick corners and edges (despite obvious unsharp masking and dark outlines clarifying almost every edge) as if you don’t know part of the icon sticking out means the whole icon sticks out. It doesn’t fucking matter if the corners did ‘bleed into the background’ - which they don’t - because you can still see what it is, in the middle! And the middle’s gotta be enough, because in the sterile interfaces you’re championing, the middle’s all there is.

It doesn’t need to change color to match a different background because matching the background is the opposite of what it’s for. Candy icons tend to stick out on dark or light - because they contain both dark and light aspects. And those don’t need to be razor-sharp, large-print-playing-card style iconography, because they’re in fucking color. Conveying information through color alone is bad - but some information is conveyed through color, and it’s kind of important to recognition and usability.

If you want to mention you have some form of colorblindness, that would explain a lot.

Google and all keep pushing this aggressively barren motif because it makes things look “clean” and “consistent,” but the actual purpose of the software is that users want to find a thing out of a sea of a million other things without having to look at and think about every individual thing.

But I can’t deal with you quoting a paragraph that says “old density doesn’t fucking matter but old density was fine anyway” just so you can be wrong in a whole new way by saying that well actually new density’s at least twice as high now. And no I don’t fucking care where the “almost” goes in that sentence. It’s three different kinds of pointless. Why am I still here.