After Android introduced the action bar after 3.x, I found that its native API hides all icons if the menu item is shown in overflow (three dots (ellipsis) on a MENU-button-lacking device, or after pressing the Menu button if that device has Menu button).
Although we could force it to display icons using reflection API like this post on StackOverflow, and applications built-in to Samsung devices, like SNote/SPlanner, also have overflow menu items with icons. Obviously this is not the built-in behavior of the original overflow menu item of the Android platform.
So I'm wondering why Android thinks overflow menu items should not have icons along with them? Is there a UI design reason that having icons in overflow menus is a bad idea?
In other words, what I would like to know is what's the philosophy behind this design of not showing icons in overflow menu, and if it's a bad idea if I force it to display an icon? Because what I find is only the description of this behavior, but without any reasonable UI/UX explanations.