Reddit is shit, I've deleted all of my accounts. I'm not defending them at all. However, didn't third party apps literally do the same thing? Where you could buy different themed icons?

This insane behavior is directly enabled by Apple.

True story time:

iOS has never, to my knowledge anyway, allowed changing icons on stock iOS ie not-rooted/jailbroken devices.

After a decade of stock icons they released the shortcuts app that allows for creation of… shortcuts.

Some crafty fuckers figured out quickly you could create a shortcut that was placeable on the home screen and could completely replace an the original app in function. Basically a shortcut that you tap and it simply opens some app, any app, and that’s it. And you could give that shortcut any image you wanted. Just download a cool .png or recolor the original one, whatever you wanted. Sounds cool. A shit-ass, annoying work around to an obvious QoL addition (making icons changeable on per app basis or allowing icon theme packs like android has had since forever).

So story over, people have a work around? Wrong. Apple specifically went out of their fucking way to add this little notification. A small one, but so fucking annoying, which was never there before and cannot be turned off by any non-root access means (so far anyway). Now when the shortcut is run it says like “automation complete” for a second and disappears. There is SPECIFICALLY an option under the shortcuts and automations in iOS to disable those types of notifications but they seem to have added it (because it wasn’t there before, confirmed by old videos where people explain how to set it up before updates broke it) as a giant double middle fingers up fuck you to customers. There’s clearly no reason to not be able to disable that notification completely when you can disable basically every other notification (oh, system update pending can’t be turned off either- gotta make sure you update constantly so you can’t accidentally have a root-able phone one day and escape such bullshit! Oh no!). They’d probably claim safety or it’s a bug or some bullshit if they even bothered to acknowledge it, which they never have and it’s been several years now.

My only conclusion is app makers cried that they wanted to sell the ability to change icons (or Apple took it upon themselves since they take 30% of that transaction anyway). Or it could actually be a bug. If it’s a bug they have never acknowledged it despite certainly thousands of reports over all the versions of iOS. Not even a “oh yeah that’s not intended. But it’s low priority.” Just silence, so, gonna have to go with the obvious option here. They fucked it as a fuck you to users. Might as well be spez at the helm.