macOS Big Sur brought along a huge design shift. The interface now more or less resembles iPadOS, and icons look more skeuomorphic (or neumorphic?) than ever.
Whether you like the new icons or not is totally dependent on you, and I’m not going to judge you if you do. But the fact that macOS Big Sur does not force all apps to follow the new design is unnerving. Especially if you’re coming from iOS, you’ll hate the fact that while iMessage lives on the dock in its new appearance, WhatsApp is still that old bubble, free of enclosed borders.
It reminds me of my old Android days, where almost every icon on my app drawer had a different shape and appearance. While that, at the time, did not make my eyes bleed, it was definitely something that I didn’t prefer. So, I usually found myself applying icon packs in a quest to create a singular app drawer that looked decent.
Behold Replacicon, a tool that, with a click of a button replaces old icons to match other icons on macOS Big Sur. This tool is fantastic. It uses a library of online sources that contain “thousands of app icons for each of your installed macOS apps.”
What’s interesting is that it uses machine learning to suggest apps that best match the Big Sur design language. Furthermore, Replacicon also keeps the icons you applied intact even if you update an app. When you first open the app, the tool displays a list of all the apps installed on your Mac. There are also filters that allow you to customize icons for apps that are currently on your dock or those that have legacy icons.
The application process is also quite simple. All you need to do is click on a suitable app icon of your choice corresponding to the app listing within the tool, and the icon will instantly change to the modified look.
It’s quite handy and is dead easy to use, which is what makes it worthwhile. All you need to do is download the tool on your Mac and you’ll be good to go without the need for any further installation.
You can download Replacicon from its website for $2.99.
The products mentioned in this story aren’t sponsored and are mentioned only because of editorial preference.
Edit 12 Aug 2021: Removed a paragraph that didn’t logically agree with the topic.
