Instagram redid its icon last Wednesday and I still can't find the app on my phone without squinting.
I know how petty that sounds written out like that. It's an icon. Nobody is owed the same little brown camera for the rest of their life. But I've had that camera - the one that looked like an actual Polaroid-ish object with a little rainbow stripe across the lens - sitting in the same spot on my home screen since I downloaded the app back in 2011, and my thumb has found it by muscle memory for about six years without my eyes doing any real work. Now there's a flat gradient blob that's mostly pink and orange with a bit of purple if you catch it edge-on, and it lives in exactly the same visual neighborhood as about four other apps I have.
The redesign itself isn't ugly, to be clear. If I'd never seen the old one I'd probably shrug and move on with my day. It's clean, it matches the new white interface inside the app now (they ditched the black background too, which is its own separate adjustment to get used to), and I get why they did it. The old icon was this weird half-skeuomorphic leftover from 2010 that didn't match anything else Facebook owns anymore. Someone on their design team put out a long, earnest writeup about distilling the "visual DNA" of the camera and the rainbow into something simpler, and I actually believe they mean it. Design people love a good origin story.
My real complaint is more boring than a taste argument. It's a findability problem. Half my apps now use some version of a purple-to-orange or blue-to-pink gradient, because that's just where app design has drifted the last couple years - flat everything, soft gradients instead of drop shadows and stitched leather textures. So my home screen has turned into this wash of similar-looking colored squares, and I have to actually read the tiny text under each one instead of pattern-matching on shape and color the way I used to. That's not how a phone is supposed to work. The whole point of a good icon, at least the old app-icon-design-101 version of the point, was that you could recognize it out of the corner of your eye while doing something else entirely, at a stoplight, whatever. A brown camera with a rainbow stripe was distinct. A gradient blob is not distinct. It's just this year's house style.
I ended up moving Instagram into its own folder by itself just so I'd stop hunting for it, which feels a little like admitting defeat.
If you want the bigger context, this is basically what's been happening across the whole industry since flat design took over a few years back. Microsoft did the tile thing first, then iOS 7 flattened everything in 2013, and now it feels like every app chasing a "modern" look is reaching for the same three-color gradient at once, so they all start looking like siblings. Instagram just joined a party that was already pretty crowded. I don't think it was a bad call on their part - I'd guess almost nobody outside people like me who write blog posts about app icons will care three weeks from now - but it's a small, real downgrade in how fast I can find the thing on my own phone, and I don't think that's nothing. Icons are supposed to save you a half-second of thought a hundred times a day. Losing that adds up.
Anyway, if you're also annoyed, the fix that worked for me was giving it its own folder with two or three other repeat offenders. Google Photos and one of my banking apps both use nearly the same pink-orange gradient now, which can't be a coincidence at this point. Give the thing its own little box and your thumb relearns where it lives in about a week. Mine already has.
I'll say one nice thing though: the app itself feels less cluttered with the black bar gone, and I noticed loading the feed felt a touch snappier on my phone, though that's probably just me imagining things because a fresh coat of paint always makes stuff feel faster for a few days.