Google’s White Framed Adaptive Icons Sure are Pissing Off Galaxy S8 Owners Who Just Got Oreo

Now that Oreo is rolling out to most Samsung Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+ units in the US, we’re seeing in real-time as one of the biggest groups of Android users on the planet finally gets a taste of Google’s newest stable mobile OS. That means they are finding stuff they like and also stuff that has left them a bit frustrated. Like the icon frame situation, for example, which is kind of comical.

Not sure what I’m talking about? Let me try to explain.

The other day, we got roped into a Tweet where a Galaxy S8 owner was pissed at both Verizon and Samsung over the fact that his newly updated S8’s icon setup now looked like white-framed garbage, even though he had turned off the icon frames setting from Samsung. What that person didn’t realize, was that most of the icons still showing white frames after disabling the setting were Google apps. I pointed that out, before getting roped into a second conversation from another couple of Galaxy S8 owners who were complaining about the same thing. That then led me to Google and found that people all over the place really aren’t happy (here, here, here, here, and here to point out a few) at all with the icon frames they are now seeing, thanks to Oreo.

For those not familiar with what’s going on, all you have to do is look back to the original Oreo announcement that talked about Adaptive Icons. Yes, Adaptive Icons are likely the culprit here, as well as the fact that Google just designed their icons to be shitty and sit on top of a white frame, whether its a circle, squircle, teardop, or square.

You’ve now got a Galaxy S8 taking on Oreo’s Adaptive Icons and being stuck with what Google is delivering, whereas previously, they may have been forcing through non-Adaptive Icons that didn’t sit atop these ugly as hell frames. Samsung’s software is more than likely pulling the system default shape of Google’s icons, which on a Samsung phone, happens to be a squircle with an icon on a white frame.

I attempted to show you this in the two GIFs here. You’ve got the Galaxy S9 with Oreo up top switching between frames and no frames. You can see that no matter what, most of the Google icons always have that stupid white frame around them in a squircle shape, outside of Hangouts. Then below, you’ve got a Pixel 2 showing the same exact thing, where no matter the shape (outside of Hangouts and Chrome), Google has set its icon set as that with an identifier atop a frame. It’s ugly! We know!

What can you do to get your old setup back? Eh, you could try a third party launcher like Nova Launcher, which gives you pretty powerful controls over how icons look. You may not be able to avoid the white frames in all situations, so an icon pack may be an additional step you’ll need to take. Otherwise, welcome to Oreo.