Exploring the Use of Visual Metaphor in App Icons of Social Media

This study explores the use of visual metaphors in social app icons within a highly competitive global app market. While prior research has primarily focused on surface-level visual attributes such as color and shape, limited attention has been paid to the symbolic and rhetorical functions of app icons, particularly from a cross-cultural perspective. To address this gap, this study investigates how visual metaphors are employed across different cultural contexts and identifies the dominant metaphor types. A quantitative content analysis was conducted on 800 social app icons from four national markets: China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and India. The findings indicate that visual metaphor appears in one-third of social app icons, with simile and hybrid metaphors dominating for interpretive efficiency. Cross-national variation, however, reveals global platform constraints interacting with local visual traditions, rendering metaphor use an outcome of both transnational norms and cultural frameworks. This study contributes to a deeper understanding of visual communication in digital design and offers practical implications for culturally sensitive app icon development.