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Google Photos launched in 2015 with an icon shaped like a pinwheel, chosen, Google said, as a nod to childhood and nostalgia. Five years later the app was used by more than a billion people a month, and Google relaunched it around what it had learned: people were not just storing photos, they were using the app to reminisce.

The icon change came with that relaunch on 25 June 2020. It keeps the four colours and the pinwheel, but each of the four blades became a simpler rounded shape, flatter and softer than before. 9to5Google noted it brought Photos in line with Google's other recent icon redesigns, such as Maps.

The app redesign was the main event. Product director David Lieb explained a new three-tab structure, Photos, Search and Library, with bigger thumbnails, auto-playing videos and a larger Memories carousel at the top. Search got an interactive map view, which Lieb said had been one of the most requested features since launch, and automatic creations such as collages and movies moved into Memories, which more than 120 million people were already viewing every month. Google described the icon as refreshed and simplified while retaining the familiar pinwheel to remind people of past memories.

The icon itself drew a shrug at best. The new logo appeared first on the iOS App Store, where it was spotted before the announcement; 9to5Google's writer said he did not like it much, and the tweet that first flagged it read simply: thanks, I hate it.

The Verge tied the simplified pinwheel to a change in what the app was for. After five years dominating photo storage, product lead David Lieb said people loved Google Photos less for the reasons it was designed than for nostalgia and looking back, and the redesign leaned into that. The app now opened on Memories, by then used by more than 120 million people a month, and the feed enlarged the pictures it guessed you would care about while shrinking receipts and parking spots. A calmer icon suited an app recasting itself as an album rather than a storage locker.

The complaint is fair. The old pinwheel had a fold that made it feel like paper and play; the rounded version reads as four coloured petals, close kin to every other Google icon. It is cleaner and less distinctive, which is the trade Google keeps making.