About a week ago I noticed that the default icon for App Center (the Flutter-based software store-front that replaced Ubuntu Software in 23.10) had changed — and not for the better!
At first I assumed the strange looking icon wasn’t intentional but a snafu or screw up I caused (I was playing around with display scaling options when the icon in the dock first changed).
But since it persisted after a reboot that made a “Joey” cause less likely.
App Center is a snap (snap-store) so it is updated automatically in the background. It turns out that a recent update rolled out that included this new icon.
The new glyph isn’t a thematic departure from the old one as it keeps the shopping bag motif, but it is flat, one colour, and uses transparent elements.
It’s more like a ‘symbolic’ icon than a standard ‘full-color’ one:
Design is subjective. I know that. You know that. What looks good to me might look awful to you, and vice versa. I don’t claim to be a master of design (have you seen some of my article thumbnails?), nor an a-grade arbitrator of taste.
And Ubuntu has pushed out individual icon changes in the past (though not all of those revamps have been universally… I’ll use the word “understood” 😅).
Anyway, icons are just icons: they don’t impact functionality or what you can do with Ubuntu (though on some level a bad icon can make it harder to discern what you can do hence why design is an entire industry and bad design can tank a product).
But this ‘new’ App Center icon is bugging me!
It’s totally unlike the rest of the Yaru icon set, and a less effective icon than the one it replaces — which was perfectly good!
I began to wonder if this gratuitous odd-ness was in fact a harbinger of a larger theme revamp Ubuntu designer’s had in the pipeline. Or, if it wasn’t, whether anyone else found the glyph gross enough to file a bug about it.
Mercifully I didn’t need to go as far as sifting through bug reports.
Github project pages show the most recent commit near the top of the page. When I visited the App Center Github page I didn’t need to click on a tab or search for what I was waned because the words “icon fix” were there staring right at me.
Can’t lie: I sighed in relief! ❤️
Yes, it turns out that the update to App Center — possibly made late last year though as the ‘new’ icon only recently appeared to me I can’t commit (😉) to saying that — included a hardcoded icon (the one you see above) to ensure those using non-Yaru icon packs see an icon at all.
However, and I don’t know the how or why, the hardcoded flat icon because the default icon in Ubuntu, which is why it suddenly appeared in the Ubuntu Dock when the update (belatedly, it seems) hit my 23.10 install.
A “fix” has been committed that restores the correct icon. Expect to see it blink into being the next time the app updates in the background in the next couple of weeks (or in my case, 2 months after everyone else).
Visual paper cuts, bad icons, or whatever you might call this — *gestures with hands at essay above* — aren’t devastating in impact. But they’re a bit slapdash if (as it sounds) unintended user-facing changes are being pushed out idly.
Still, I can’t wait to have the 2.5D shopping bag icon back, and full Ubuntu-y Yaru-y consistency restored on my desktop.