I think they've been going the wrong way lately, personally. I have trouble figuring out all the unlabeled icons myself whenever I use an app I don't use every

I think they've been going the wrong way lately, personally. I have trouble figuring out all the unlabeled icons myself whenever I use an app I don't use every day. Took me a while to even figure out what happened to the foursquare check in button when it became a small tiny unlabeled icon. I know I can tap and hold, but I've never seen any one else do that, never seen a user do that in a user study, and it's a pain in the ass doing it for a ton of glyphs in an interface. I'm more likely to just assume functionality doesn't exist then go tap and hold on half a dozen icons. My users in apps I launch with the new style guidelines have horrendous times due to not noticing the main action is often an unlabeled icon with no chrome in the top right action bar, etc.. Often they flounder around in the app doing what they can tapping on content directly and never even try or notice the action bar icons. Do flat, chromeless, unlabeled icons look good? Yes, but they are about as unusable as possible. The worst thing is that we are forced to follow Google guidelines if we want to get featured, and their design guide is a piece of crap not backed up by user studies. So we developers end up implementing all these stupid work arounds, like a tutorial overlay the first time any screen is shown with a big freaking white arrow and some text pointing to the otherwise unnoticeable corner icons...