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Nobody designs for small iPhone devices anymore

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Re: Nobody designs for small iPhone devices anymore

#191

Post by Adrig »

Without even debating the pertinence and aggressiveness of this article's title, some of these examples are just ridiculous.

Negative space is good. It's good for readability and accessibility. Nowadays, most apps are designed to be scrollable, which means that cramping as much information as possible is probably not helpful.

>There’s too much padding on the navigation bar. For me it’s too much for my small phone and big thumb.

So… You want less space to tap with your big thumb?

Google maps is about the results list, not the map.

Other comments are just straight opinions about what he likes ("too much padding there and there"). Okay? That's just prescriptive feedback and don't bring anything valuable to the conversation.

It's also interesting to see that people in this thread have many design opinions, and almost systematically someone has the opposite feeling in their replies. It's proof that design is not just following a guideline. It's about choices, trade-offs and context.

Re: Nobody designs for small iPhone devices anymore

#192

Post by brundolf »

derefr wrote: post #188
brundolf wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not supporting people jumping to bad conclusions or being toxic, but it's worth pointing out the author said this is the 2020 SE. Which is to say the body of an iPhone 8, not a 5. Which is to say roughly the same size as all iPhones before the X (and larger than the brand-new Mini!). That's not Edit: I was wrong about the mini being smaller; it's somewhat larger than the 8/SE

> Which is to say roughly the same size as all iPhones before the X (and larger than the brand-new Mini!) This isn’t about physical size, though; it’s about screen resolution and aspect ratio. > iPhone 12 mini: 2340×1080 @ 476dpi > iPhone SE 2020: 1334×750 @ 326dpi Yes, the 12 mini’s screen is 5.4” while the SE’s screen is 4.7”, but if the SE had the 12 mini’s DPI, it’d have a workable, modern-ish resolution. (Note h…

My mistake; I made the assumption the Mini would be smaller

Still, the point remains that lots of people are rocking an iPhone older than the XS (the 9 came out at the same time as the X) and would have these same problems

Re: Nobody designs for small iPhone devices anymore

#193

Post by tinus_hn »

chrismorgan wrote: post #71
tyfon wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The custom buttons without labels are a pet peeve of mine actually. I can never guess what the buttons do when they only have pictures and each app use their own icon set. There are some apps that use standard buttons that I recognize but far too many want to be fancy and roll their own making the app practically unusable unless you guess correct or press all buttons to see what they do. But you are correct in that i…

On Android, by convention you can long-press icon-only toolbar buttons and the label will show as a tooltip. Non-native apps (fuzzy definition) lack this far too often, but it’s always worth trying. Not sure if iOS has something like this.

What is the advantage of this? If you can long press a toolbar button to get a label that states what the button is for, it’s easier to just tap the button and see what it is for.

Re: Nobody designs for small iPhone devices anymore

#194

Post by rojcyk »

brundolf wrote: post #186
rojcyk wrote: post #181

Wow, lots of assumptions or designer blaming in this thread. Not that it is unexpected, but it still hurts since it is not as black and white as people here draw it to be. Let me give you my perspective as a designer who spent quite a lot of time on this topic. 1. The fact that some designers ignore other devices than their own is definitely true. That is why I created a Figma plugin to broaden the perspective. https…

Not supporting people jumping to bad conclusions or being toxic, but it's worth pointing out the author said this is the 2020 SE. Which is to say the body of an iPhone 8, not a 5. Which is to say roughly the same size as all iPhones before the X (and larger than the brand-new Mini!). That's not Edit: I was wrong about the mini being smaller; it's somewhat larger than the 8/SE

I know that the author is speaking about SE 2020, but the issues listed in the article (at least some of them) to me seemed like bugs rather then deliberate design decisions.

But I completely agree that the iPhone 6. 7, 8, SE viewport should serve as the baseline for most, since the market share is quite significant (it takes the third spot worldwide).

Re: Nobody designs for small iPhone devices anymore

#195

Post by daniellarusso »

ryandrake wrote: post #171
jdmoreira wrote: post #53

I'm an iOS developer. The problem is multifaceted. Designers have completely disregarded these devices. They design for the latest and greatest in Figma and when we implement their design and eventually run it on an iPhone SE of course everything is super crammed, labels overflow into each other, you can't see some text, things just generally look bad, etc... etc... Our UI code has multiple ifs at this point where we…

This is not a mobile device problem or an iOS problem. This is a competence problem with your designers. The role of a UX designer is not to produce a portrait-only, default-font-size-only pixel-perfect picture on three popular phone screen sizes, and throw it over the fence for developers to develop and not ask questions. Designers must ask, what if the user prefers landscape mode? What if their fonts need to be lar…

Exactly.

It is just mediocre design.

Re: Nobody designs for small iPhone devices anymore

#196

Post by mro_name »

I do.

Habit shapes creation.

I use an SE and naturally design & build for it. (Plug: https://mro.name/ShaarliOS)

But when a former 500K ipa (objc) becomes a ~70MB upload (swift) that makes >300MB traffic submitting, you clearly know the culture behind it is not sustainable and has no future.

Apple doesn't care about the low end. Not in developer tools, not in OS (weekly big sur updates in the GBs) and so that's what designers get used to. Apple sells hardware. Software and services is the bait.

Those who do care are a few opinionated geeks. Not the mainstream, not where the money is.

Re: Nobody designs for small iPhone devices anymore

#197

Post by bartvk »

mnahkies wrote: post #140
frosted-flakes wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Android already has that standard. Long press almost always brings up a tooltip.

I guess much like aria attributes it varies based on the quality of the product/motivation of the business. I just tried one of my banking apps and a Reddit client and found neither provided tooltips - perhaps they thought those particular icons are too self explanatory or perhaps they didn't bother/used a cross platform tech that didn't make it easy. Actually even on Google maps I don't seem to get tooltips for the…

You say "even Google Maps", and something surprised me when I explored their SDK. So I don't know about Android, but the Google Maps SDK on iOS does not use the iOS widgets. They draw everything themselves. Integrating Google Maps is a pain, because standard layout techniques don't work (for example for labels on markers). The whole thing felt really ancient.

It doesn't surprise me in the least that it didn't work as expected.

Re: Nobody designs for small iPhone devices anymore

#198

Post by derefr »

brundolf wrote: post #192
derefr wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Which is to say roughly the same size as all iPhones before the X (and larger than the brand-new Mini!) This isn’t about physical size, though; it’s about screen resolution and aspect ratio. > iPhone 12 mini: 2340×1080 @ 476dpi > iPhone SE 2020: 1334×750 @ 326dpi Yes, the 12 mini’s screen is 5.4” while the SE’s screen is 4.7”, but if the SE had the 12 mini’s DPI, it’d have a workable, modern-ish resolution. (Note h…

My mistake; I made the assumption the Mini would be smaller Still, the point remains that lots of people are rocking an iPhone older than the XS (the 9 came out at the same time as the X) and would have these same problems

You're correct; I myself still have an iPhone 8. But I tend to think of problems I experience on my iPhone 8 as "being gradually left behind by an ecosystem that has moved on", rather than as "not being supported." (Like how it feels to try to use Windows 8.1 in 2021. It’s not technically End-of-Life’d... but do third-party devs even mention it on download-page compatibility lists any more?)

With an iPhone 8, I know I'm the one "at fault" at this point for sticking with this device, stuck on the wrong side of an inflection point in screen size/resolution from the introduction of "edge" displays all across the ecosystem. I might expect Apple themselves to tune their first-party apps for my device for as long as they claim to support it; but I don’t expect App Store devs to do so. They’re shipping cross-platform designs on a tight schedule, for screens that are almost-exclusively twice as large and high-resolution as mine.

The iPhone SE case is more concerning, because it's still for sale at the Apple Store. This means Apple is claiming it's fit-for-purpose for at least some use-cases. (Maybe that claim doesn't extend to "running apps from the App Store", though.)

I feel like, at this point, the SE is almost the same as the iPod Touch—it's not a thing you get to take advantage of the Apple app ecosystem; it's more a thing you get to either use Apple's first-party apps for basic use-cases, or because it's a very cheap automated development smoke-test deploy target (roughly the iOS equivalent of a Mac Mini.)

Re: Nobody designs for small iPhone devices anymore

#199

Post by mgkimsal »

layer8 wrote: post #158
mgkimsal wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amen. I'm sticking with my 12 mini for now, but just left the original SE. they're close in size, but more screen means more reaching/stretching for my small hands. SE2 was bigger, but because the screen is smaller, I'm wondering if that may have been the better option? I miss the Touch ID too..

I had an iPhone 6 (same size as SE2) for a year after the 5, and then reverted to the SE1 because the 6 was just too slippery with its round edges, and just a tad bit too wide to grip it naturally, and I had to use the Reachability feature quite often. So while it may work for you, I can’t personally recommend it over the 12 mini.

I'd meant I considered an SE2, but didn't get it, because of the physical size.

Re: Nobody designs for small iPhone devices anymore

#200

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

mro_name wrote: post #196

I do. Habit shapes creation. I use an SE and naturally design & build for it. (Plug: https://mro.name/ShaarliOS ) But when a former 500K ipa (objc) becomes a ~70MB upload (swift) that makes >300MB traffic submitting, you clearly know the culture behind it is not sustainable and has no future. Apple doesn't care about the low end. Not in developer tools, not in OS (weekly big sur updates in the GBs) and so that's what…

> you clearly know the culture behind it is not sustainable and has no future.

It's not a culture shift, it's a technology shift. Systemwide shared-libraries are going away because they involve all-manner of versioning difficulties (DLL-Hell, etc). Simultaneously, computers have enough physical memory such that processes don't need to share libraries in-memory to keep usage low, and the security advantages of single-upgrades to shared libraries are wiped-out by programs breaking due to unexpected changes in their dependencies, and writing software is now accepted as a treadmill: ship regular updates (monthly? weekly?) where the only change is updating to the latest dependencies and ensuring tests pass - these 3 things combined lead to portable, self-contained software that can run on minimal platforms. Other examples include Go's single-executable statically-linked compilation. And so on.

But this is progress. I do expect eventually we'll have entirely dependency-free software where every redistributable is effectively its own self-contained computer system (basically, a VM): that has tremendous implications for long-term application support. Apple (rightfully) gets a LOT of stick for their lack of backwards-compatibility support, but if all software for Apple's platforms eventually becomes more like a VM image then we'll be able to run those VM images on Apple's future phones - and even non-Apple phones - and non-phones, decades from now - which is a refreshing change from where we are today where we can't even run games from only 2-3 years ago.

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