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.
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewRoom?f...
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.