Apple’s Icons Have That Shape for a Very Good Reason

Something can be refined and intentional but still annoying and worse than before. They can use whatever math they want, it doesn’t mean that the design is “good” now.

First, “consistency” makes no sense as a design goal for rounded corners! When there are two nested rounded-corner shapes, you never make both curves exactly the same: the outer curve has to be a little different than the inner curve in order for the shapes to look good together. Therefore, iOS should never use exactly the same curve as the device: it should use something that is slightly smaller.

The modified icon shapes are just not “comfortable” to look at. They also don’t blend well with other shapes that appear in the majority of app icons either, like inner circles and straight lines.

Apple's curves are effectively superellipses, so-named by Piet Hein -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superellipse.

I wish there was a good way for generating these curves in something like Illustrator because hard corners are rather jarring when rendered at certain sizes.

This reminds me of what Alan Watts calls "prickly goo" or "gooey prickles".

Why is this desirable?