iPhone 6 makes it obvious why there is little investment in Android apps

[0000757]

Facebook, 1Password, etc etc etc. Dude it's not hard to grasp the fact that **** is broken. Why are you giving push back on this issue as if it doesn't exist?

I have both Facebook and 1password installed on my iPhone 6. With Facebook I do have the third column cut off, but that's not a "app breaking bug". The app still works fine. Yeah, it's a minor inconvenience, but I can still make 100% effective use of the app.

As far as 1password, what's the issue you're seeing there. I haven't had any issue with 1password due to screen size.

What other apps? I don't have too many (29), but none are entirely unusable or broken because of screen size.

 

[matthewadams]

Oh lord,.. this again.

Having recently done an identical app both for iOS and Android natively I got a fair bit of insight in the procedure.
The way Android handles the different screen sizes (on phones, not speaking of the tablet form factor) is actually done okay and not as different as to Apple's approach now.
The thing is though, that many apps were designed with the methods introduced early on. I think flexible support for multiple screensizes was actually introduced in iOS 6 ("Auto Layout"), but I believe a lot of devs reverted to using the more fixed size approach, since Auto Layout seemed unnecessarily complicated on the first approach.

That being said, the Scaler approach is the best they could've done. And it doesn't break any apps (since - I believe - the rendering part is done outside and without knowledge of the app itself).

(Given that, developing for Android is still a pain in the ass with a ****** IDE and an emulator that takes at least a minute to even boot)

 

[Dan70]

[...]

I know what you're saying.

I had an Android phone (Galaxy Mini) for about a year or so. I hated it so much. One reason why out of the many I didn't like it was that lots of apps weren't compatible with my phone. It wasn't old and these were big, popular apps, most of them games like Cut The Rope or Angry Birds didn't work when I tried them.

So when it comes to iOS developers, all they need to do really is maybe two or three revisions (ie. iPhone/iPad and maybe different screen sizes).

 

[poppy10]

I don't think OP knows how Android development works. Android phones come in an array of sizes and resolutions, and most apps (post Android 3) just work - they reflow to fit the screen regardless of the shape, size or resolution. The developer doesn't need to code specifically for each and every device - the same app will work on a low-res Moto E and a quad-HD LG G3. Hell, even Blackberry's new weird square phone runs android apps fairly well.

Apple have moved to a similar development process whereby apps will adapt to any resolution/size, but many older apps were made in an dev environment where there were only 2 iPhone sizes and haven't been made with resizing in mind - hence all Apple can do is blow them up (to a blurry mess) until the app developer updates them.

 

[bozzykid]

Why do developers need access to the hardware specifically? Granted, it makes things easier, but it's a not a massive deal breaker when you can just use the previous model as a benchmark.

Most developers aren't even going to bother working on updating their projects until the hardware is available. Things change in pre-release code and spending development time and money before you even know what you need to update is a waste for many small time devs.

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The iPhone simulator could emulate the screen size just fine, so there really is no need to have access to the hardware. The developers may have forgotten that the apps could be submitted for approval before iOS8 was released, and are now stuck waiting though.

Emulate the screen size? Developers didn't even know the screen size until 2 weeks before it was released. No way they are going to spend time and money to update their apps until they know what they need update. I would imagine many devs are hard at work right now updating their apps.

 

[amoda]

Same thing was said about Macs with Retina display. Tons of websites, and even major programs like Office and Photoshop weren't compatible with the new resolution. Now pretty much everyone has transitioned, and we're all better off for it.

New technology has growing pains, that doesn't mean we should stand still.

 

[Rian Gray]

It takes time to adapt to new hardware AND software. Apple did give some breaks with software (iOS8), but that by itself isn't enough. Think of it this way, you wrote an app that works perfectly on iPad, now you want to port it to iPhone. They may share same OS, but because of the hardware, you will have to tweak bit by bit, even if it's a simple calculator app.

It will take awhile, I would guess around 3 months, for developers to come up with Apps that fully incorporate iPhone 6 and 6+, just like it took about 3 months for iPhone app developers to come up with good iPad apps.

 

[B&B]

Speaking of scaling, the 5/5s added another row of icons and though substantially bigger, the 6 and 6+ have each added only one extra row. I assumed the 6+ would have more.

 

[deviant]

So developers just want to make an app and make money on it FOREVER and they don't expect, ever, the screen sizes to change, phones to get bigger, etc? Go away. a month or two is NOTHING for me. I can wait, i don't care. A month is not an eternity.

 

[jamesrick80]

This is a dumb post, android does a good job in scaling apps, any device just works....

 

[T-Will]

However, now the developers have no choice but to invest more time in fixing the apps. Sure, the big corporations and businesses probably have no issue paying an app developer to come up with timely fixes. What about the smaller guys that didn't see these issues coming?

The irony is that some of the worst apps that are the slowest to receive updates are from the big businesses (Good app, AT&T apps, Logitech apps, Chipotle).