Mac App Store Icons Messed Up

Today I released minor updates to Gamma Control and Counterparts Lite. After pushing the updates on the Mac App Store, I had the unpleasant surprise to see the two icons had been put on a black iOS-like round rectangle box. It looks ugly, not only because the icons aren’t designed to be in such a box, but also because of the lack of smoothing at the edges.

In truth, it looks like Apple is changing the image’s transparency mask to match what it should be on iOS, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to do for the iOS App Store but shouldn’t apply to icons on the Mac App Store. Browsing the Mac App Store seems to reveal a few more apps released today and yesterday with an out of place black box surrounding the icon.

If you are a developer, you might want to postpone your release until this is fixed to avoid showing your customers to show a hideous icon. I do hope this will solve itself without having to submit a new version of the app.

Note that this only affects the icon shown on the Mac App Store. Everything looks fine on iTunes Connect prior submission, and it doesn’t affect the icon of the app installed on a user’s computer.

(Added as issue #17841429 on Apple’s bug tracker.)