&gt;  You have to teach the user what the icon means.<p>Recognition speed presumably goes up with familiarity. I have Age - 6 years of experience reading, I have far less than that with whatever icon you come up with.<p>Let&#x27;s take starting an app as an example.<p>On my Smartphone I use the email client &quot;Nine&quot;. I probably open up the app manually (versus tapping on a notification) about 5 or 6 times a day.<p>It took me ~3-5 months of use to be able to look for the icon first versus looking for the text. Note that this is WITH keeping the icon in the exact same place on my home screen the entire time.<p>So that is what, 450 impressions for, well, no real speed improvement.<p>In a sea of words, a good icon can help an app stand out. But I&#x27;d argue that a good textual name helps more.<p>If you have multiple products, having your company name start off the title of all your products just means I cannot find your product in my alphabetized app list.<p>Changing app names is another huge problem. Google&#x27;s constant re-branding of how I send SMSs on my phone has been very unconductive to me remembering anything. Half the messaging apps out there have the same type of icon (a speech bubble), the textual names make them unique.<p>That said Facebook cheats by calling theirs Messenger. :)<p>Also, enough blue icons. Stop it. Everything is one of 3 shades of blue, gross color differentiation kicks in WAY before shape matching does. The three easiest apps to find on phone are the three apps that still have &quot;out of fashion&quot; black icons.<p>&gt; Icons are like visual acronyms.<p>I disagree that the analogy is 100%. Our brains have this giant section dedicated to nothing but recognizing characters in our native written language. Sure we have a lot of brain power going to shape recognition in general, but character recognition is so incredibly trained in our heads that it should be our go to.