iPhone 4 apps

[old-school]

Hi all,

This (is probably) a daft question, but has anyone got any idea on how the app store will cater for the larger resolution apps? I know that everything will be rendered at a higher quality and obviously all existing apps will work by pixel-doubling, but will existing apps on the iPhone be updated for "iPhone4 compatibility"? Just wondering about the semantics.

 

[jtara]

I think it's going to be a big mess for a while.

They are doing iPhone 4 compatibility for existing apps a bit different than they did with iPad. It's a bit better.

On iPad, the whole app's "canvas" is just pixel-doubled.

On iPhone 4, bitmaps are pixel-doubled, but buttons and text are drawn in full resolution.

Early reports are that the iPhone 4 pixel-doubling can be problematic. For one, there are reports that the existing Navigon app sucks on iPhone 4. I assume this will be true for any game that does any significant animation, as well. There has to be some significant overhead for the pixel-doubling.

I think making apps that will work well on iPhone 4, while still working on older phones, and still running on iPhone OS 3.x is going to be beyond most developers. It's a bit complicated to do, and error-prone. Add iPad, which is on iPhone OS 3.2, and you have a royal mess for developers to navigate.

I expect the app store to splinter once again. Now we will see "HD" (iPad-only) apps, and "4" apps sitting along-side the original apps. Unless Apple puts their foot down and puts a stop to it.

 

[mkrishnan]

On iPhone 4, bitmaps are pixel-doubled, but buttons and text are drawn in full resolution.

It'll be interesting to see how this works... when the early Windows Mobile VGA devices came out (the one I had was a Dell Axim x51v or something like that), they used an approach like this and it was very messy... but OTOH developers are a lot more aggressive on the iPhone, and hopefully most things will get re-released in iPhone 4 versions.