How To Bring Back Oddly Shaped App Icons in macOS 26 Tahoe

June 11, 2025

macOS 26 Tahoe replaces the oddly shaped app icons that once brought joy and personality to the Dock with the familiar squircle icons from iOS.

Here's what that looks like. The lovely Things icon now sits awkwardly on a glass background 😢

Dock in macOS 26 showing the Things app icon placed on a glass surface.

I strongly dislike this change. Part of the Mac’s soul was in its expressive, varied app icons, a case of character over conformity.

Fortunately, there's a way to bring back the personality and charm that custom icon shapes add to macOS. This post shows how to do it both as a macOS user and as an app developer.

For Users: Restoring Custom Icon Shapes

When you manually assign an app icon through Finder, macOS respects the shape and doesn't force the glass background. Interestingly, this also works if you just replace the icon with the same one.

Dock in macOS 26 showing the Things app icon with its old oddly shaped icon.

Here's how to replace the app icon:

  1. Right-click the app in the Applications folder and choose Get Info.
  2. Right-click the app again and choose Show Package Contents.
  3. Open the Contents folder.
  4. Then open the Resources folder.
  5. Find the icon file with the .icns extension.
  6. Drag that file onto the icon thumbnail in the info panel.
  7. Quit and relaunch the app to see the updated icon in the Dock.

Here's a short video showing the steps:

App developers will likely start shipping new squircle-style icons soon. If you prefer the current look, it's a good idea to back up their .icns files now so you can restore the classic shape later.

For Developers: Swapping Icons at Runtime

Although squircle icons are now the default, developers can still display a custom-shaped icon in the Dock by setting a view on NSApplication.shared.dockTile.contentView.

That's what I will do in Festivitas and Smash Smash. The default icon keeps everything inside the squircle, and anything that extends beyond it gets clipped. On launch, I use the NSDockTile API to replace it with the full version that includes the unique shape.

Here's what that looks like when users launch Festivitas and Smash Smash with those changes: