If you give up skeuomorphism, you have no model for icons.
You could have every icon be a smartphone, but that won't help. Without some real-world basis, icons are just abstract shapes. Text boxes might be better. At least you don't need an icon dictionary.
Everything now has to be mobile-friendly, which means 1) fat fingers, and 2) you can't see the thing you're touching. "Mouse-over" for more info is not meaningful for touchscreens. So icons can't have explanations.
Whatever happened to Google's "material design"? Did anything ever use that? Even Google's own web sites didn't use it, although Google had a react.js implementation.
Incidentally, don't use a compass icon for anything other than a compass on a device that actually has compass hardware.
Maybe the future of icons is corporate logos. That's what favicons are.
> "Mouse-over" for more info is not meaningful for touchscreens. So icons can't have explanations.
I suspect the period of not having a decent UI for surfacing alt-text (on web) or equivalent help for native apps on mobile devices is probably not going to extend long into the future. I don't know what the UI convention will be (gaze tracking? light-touch with pressure sensitive screens? some gesture?). Touch UIs are (despite being ubiquitous with the explosion of the last decade) still relatively immature.
Everything now has to be mobile-friendly, which means 1) fat fingers, and 2) you can't see the thing you're touching. "Mouse-over" for more info is not meaningful for touchscreens. So icons can't have explanations.
Whatever happened to Google's "material design"? Did anything ever use that? Even Google's own web sites didn't use it, although Google had a react.js implementation.
Incidentally, don't use a compass icon for anything other than a compass on a device that actually has compass hardware.
Maybe the future of icons is corporate logos. That's what favicons are.