Guess the App
An app icon under eighty pixels of blur, which is enough to reduce a 512-pixel square to about four colours and a curve. Each rung sharpens it: 42, then 20, then 8, then one and a half.
89 apps, which is to say the home screen almost everyone has, plus the ones that are enormous in a country you may not live in. Icons are designed to be legible at 60 pixels on a shelf of sixty others, and that constraint is exactly what makes them guessable through a blur.
Name the app as its icon comes into focus.
Play Guess the AppThe first rung is a colour and a layout
At 80px of blur, what survives is the average colour of the icon and the rough position of its mass. That is more than it sounds. A saturated green square with a lighter mass at the centre is a small club: Spotify, WhatsApp, Cash App, Duolingo, Grindr. A yellow ground with a white shape is Snapchat. A vivid magenta-to-orange wash is Instagram. Blue with a white glyph in the middle is the largest family and the hardest.
Where the mass sits matters as much as its colour. An icon with a single centred glyph on a plain ground blurs to a soft blob dead centre; an icon that is a photograph or a scene blurs to something with structure in the corners. A white ground with a small coloured mark floating in the middle of it is the design language of Google's apps, and there are seven of those in the deck.
Count the colours if you can. Four distinct colours in a compact arrangement is Google or Microsoft. Two flat colours with a hard edge between them is a fintech or a utility. A full spectrum gradient is a creative tool.
What the sharpening steps give you
80, 42, 20, 8, 1.5 pixels of blur. The second rung is where a glyph acquires an outline, and the third is where you can count the strokes in it. By 8px almost any icon is nameable if you have seen it, which means the game is really decided on the first two rungs.
Each rung is also drawn slightly oversized — 1.34x down to 1.02x — because a CSS blur samples transparency beyond the edge of the image, and without that overscan an 80px blur fades the outer band of the icon into the page and the whole thing reads as a vignette rather than as an icon.
Where the icons come from
The App Store's own search API, keyless, at 512 pixels square. Every name and seller pair in the seed file was checked against it and resolves to a real icon.
The seller field is the interesting part of that list, because it is not always the brand: Venmo is filed under The Delancey Corporation, Amazon under AMZN Mobile, Instacart under Maplebear. Names are trimmed to the part everyone uses, and the lookup accepts a longer store title only when it starts with that — so Telegram finds Telegram Messenger, while Signal never matches Signal Booster Pro. Apps that only exist under a name nobody would type, or that have left the US store, are deliberately absent.
Scoring
Ten rounds, five rungs: 1000, 620, 380, 240, 150. Answering at 80px blur is a genuine gamble and worth taking two or three times a run, because the multiplier on a correct first-rung answer with a live streak is the single biggest number in the game.