Mac Apps Can Escape From Squircle Jail If They’re Not in the Mac App Store

Tyler Hall:

We all know about macOS Tahoe’s terrible app icons and how
3rd party developers have been confined to squircle jail.

If you’re lucky enough to distribute an app outside the Mac App
Store, you can break free of squircle jail using
NSDockTilePlugIn. It’s not strictly the intended use-case of
that API. And it’s not allowed in the Mac App Store, either. But
it can solve the problem.

So today’s release of Iris adds three additional app icons to
choose from in the app’s Special Preferences Settings pane.
And since they use the NSDockTilePlugIn API, the custom icon
remains even when you quit the app.

Iris is far from the only app using this or other techniques to sort-of escape squircle jail.