How to change default App Icons on Big Sur? Is there a way?

[jkundi]

Hi struggling to change the default system icons on Big Sur, is there a way, anyoner been successful? The standard method of draging or copying/pasting icon in 'get info' does not work either.

 

[fisherking]

iconchamp - april 30th (i think).

default OS app icons have not been changeable copying/pasting for a long time (with other apps, this still works).

 

[powdR]

Up to and including Catalina, changing all icons including stock Apple apps, have been pretty trivial. Plenty guides out there.
With Big Sur, though, everything really is getting much worse and it is ridiculous.

I'm putting this here and following these threads (and over at Stack Overflow and Superuser and *Different)... I have a super nice set of minimal, flat, geometrical icons that I've purchased, donated to and or collected from various places over several years. Some Apple apps _are_ changeable, like Numbers, Pages etc. but Messages, Safari and the others are locked down.
There _is_ a guide available, but following that you must be prepared to wipe your system if it breaks. That would have been okay with me if the change was persistent, but as with all .app icons you'd have to re-do this on every update.

This situation is really annoying. As in, REALLY annoying. And ridiculous.

As an example, look at the flat geometrical icons now available (for free, used to be $5) from http://appicns.com/