New iPad Uses Retina Graphics When Running iPhone Apps

[ps45]

Yes, it encouraged app makers to work on iPad specific versions.
But, the incentive was that they could charge users again to have the same app on their iPhone and their iPad.
And I don't like that. Just like the cloud should mean we are beyond having to re-buy our music again when the next format comes along, it should be the case that once you've bought FlightControl, you've bought FlightControl. Steam-style.

 

[Gooberton]

do a lot of people have many iPhone apps on their iPads? I have none, so wouldn't benefit from this feature. I don't know of many people who do as well.

I have none , can anyone give reason why you would?

 

[kayloh20]

I find it interesting how consumers blame Apple for not providing a way to present iPhone applications on the iPad as best as possible as opposed to blaming the application developers for not providing an iPad optimized version of their application. Why is it always Apple's fault and never the developers'?

 

[ncaissie]

Clearly there are tradeoffs involved -- the developers of an app for a jailbroken iPad don't have the same concerns as Apple would. It's relatively easy to make a "hack" that forces iPhone apps to run in Retina mode on an iPad without taking into account things like memory usage, CPU usage and image quality. If the jailbroken app doesn't work, the expectation was pretty low anyway -- so the user just uninstalls the app and goes on. If it happens to work well for the apps they use, great. But if Apple makes a decision and it impacts the way the device works in a negative way, everybody is going to suffer for it.

From my short experience with that mod I was able to enable it for any app I want. Why can't Apple offer the same? That is what a monopoly does to a company. I just hope they don’t turn out like MS.

 

[macduke]

Second, if Apple did decide to use the Retina graphics for 2x mode on older iPads, it would introduce a few problems. One is that the original iPad is memory starved as it is. It came with 256MB and it wasn't until the iPhone 4 with it's Retina display did Apple bump up the RAM to 512MB.

I agree with most everything you said except the part above. "Retina" isn't some magical thing—it's actually lower resolution than the original iPad display. 960x640 iPhone 4/4S vs 1024x768 iPad 1/2. So that's not an issue. But as you said, Apple's main issue was getting developers to crank out high quality, iPad-optimized apps. Devs saw the crappy pixelized versions and remade them for a better experience. I think that is one of several reasons many Android tablet apps look like oversized smartphone apps. Google screwed up there.

 

[gatortpk]

There are a few reasons why the new iPad would do this and the old one doesn't. The most basic reason is that on Retina displays, apps run with Retina assets if available. Non-Retina displays never use Retina assets. In this regard, the new iPad is behaving exactly the same way as the old ones.

Second, if Apple did decide to use the Retina graphics for 2x mode on older iPads, it would introduce a few problems. One is that the original iPad is memory starved as it is. It came with 256MB and it wasn't until the iPhone 4 with it's Retina display did Apple bump up the RAM to 512MB. Second, should Apple use the Retina graphics for both the 1x and 2x modes? If they do, they are wasting CPU and battery to produce pixels that will only be scaled down. If they don't, they would need to come up with a way for apps to switch between 1x and 2x mode at runtime (they currently can't -- there is nothing in the API to even allow for that possibility). Also there is the issue of how the graphics would look when you take Retina graphics and scale them back down to 1x -- it's not nearly as nice as simply using the 1x graphics already.

One more thing to consider -- when the original iPad came out, there were no Retina display devices. All iPhone apps were 1x apps. The pixel doubling mode of the original iPad was just a way to allow iPhone apps to take up more of the screen than they would otherwise. Clearly Apple's goal was to have more iPad native/Universal apps. Spending engineering resources to make "legacy" apps run better is typically not a good use of time. Turning on Retina support on the new iPad for iPhone apps didn't require a large amount of engineering time. In fact, due to how the iOS APIs work, it may have not even required any time to get it up and running. Just the time required to verify that it did work okay.

This makes sense. I didn't even know that the iPad 2 ran retina iPhone apps at 480x320! (I only had the iPad 2 for 14 days, then returned it because the Verizon network was too slow. The AT&T model was still out of stock, so I never got another iPad till this 3rd Generation iPad.) Anyway, I never noticed that the older iPads ran the non retina iPhone app resolutions. That would be awful if this were still the case, 16 pixels on the third generation iPad would be used to show one pixel of an iPhone app!

When I saw iPhone apps running on my "new" iPad, I just assumed that all iPads ran the iPhone apps at 960x480. I could see on the new iPad that 4 pixels were in use for every 1 pixel of an retina iPhone app, but what's really cool is that inside the iPhone Apps showing PDFs, it's full native resolution, meaning 1920x960 pixels are used for showing PDF content, and perhaps any regular text (non bitmapped graphics/text).

Had I known that the older iPads ran iPhone apps at 480x320 resolution when doubled in size (crazy!), I would have created this thread on Friday, March 16, when I got my new iPad in the mail! I simply assumed Apple had put retina resolution iPhone apps on the iPads from the beginning (when iOS 4 came out). I don't think RAM would have been the issue though.

It does seem possible that Apple was encouraging developers write an iPad version of their iPhone apps. If an app can make more use of a larger screen, then that app would inherently be better on the iPad. Double sizing iPhone apps just makes objects (buttons, etc.) bigger than they need to be, instead of adding more objects if applicable. The iPad screen area is 7.7 times greater. I've seen how Apple compares the iPad apps to Android apps designed for the phone running on tablets, and how an app designed for the larger iPad screen is much better than a double sized Android apps on the tablet counterparts. I think one great example is Facebook. The iPad version of the Facebook app makes great use of the extra space (and it took quite awhile for it to be released).

Perhaps if Apple had let the retina iPhone apps show 960x640 natively on the iPad 1 and 2, there would have been less pressure for the developers to create iPad specific apps since only 28% of the iPad screen is window boxed when apps are native at 960x640.

 

[GenesisST]

This is a clear example of apple's stupidity. Why is this not enabled on older iPads???

I'm glad you all voted this down. It makes perfect sense! It is totally not a valid complaint that all Apple has to do is slightly change some software, so that hundreds of thousands of apps can be useful, but they don't. I guess it is ok, 480x320 looks awesome on my 1024x768 display!

Well, it might sound simple for simple minds. The SDK probably has an algorithm like this:

+ (UIImage*) imageNamedNSString*)aName
{
UIImage* img = nil;
if (isRetina) {
img = load aName with "@2x";
}
if (img == nil) {
img = load aName;
}
return img;
}

Simple enough, will cover most cases now that there has been retina apps form almost 2 years.

For the rest... It has been two years! And it still works! And should look as before anyways.

 

[d4rkc4sm]

how is this even news worthy? quality has gone down the crapper.

 

[ncaissie]

I have a few, mostly games though. I bought a lot of them before I bought an iPad. So instead of paying $40ish to upgrade them all for the iPad, I just use the iPhone version. I don't game much on the iPad anyway. It's mainly a reading device and any little gaming I do is done on my iPhone whenever I'm on break or have some time to goof around.

I was in the same situations except I spent over $200 on my ipod touch and then purchased an iPad 2. Luckily EA and Gameloft have a lot of $.99 sales and I ended up owning 2 of many games. The rest I just don't play.

----------

I have none , can anyone give reason why you would?

I had an iphone and ipod touch before I had my ipad 2. And spent quite a bit on games.

----------

I find it interesting how consumers blame Apple for not providing a way to present iPhone applications on the iPad as best as possible as opposed to blaming the application developers for not providing an iPad optimized version of their application. Why is it always Apple's fault and never the developers'?

No one is blaming apple. We would just preferred if apple spent the little bit of time to implement it (Or buy it from the person who made Retinapad) and satisfied they loyal customers instead of letting devs charge us twice the $ for the same game.

 

[dotslashlycos]

Are we sure this doesn't work on the iPad 2?

I noticed a few days ago on my iPad 2 that some iPhone apps run at 2x had crisper (presumably iPhone retina) graphics. I assumed that this was something apple pushed in the latest iOS update that came out the same time as the new iPad. See the attached image of this Taco Bell app:

 

[SmileyDude]

I agree with most everything you said except the part above. "Retina" isn't some magical thing—it's actually lower resolution than the original iPad display. 960x640 iPhone 4/4S vs 1024x768 iPad 1/2. So that's not an issue.

Well yes, Retina isn't a magical thing -- it's just Apple's marketing term that also carries a few requirements with it. One of those requirements so far has been that it's double the resolution of the non-retina display for that device class.

But there is an issue -- a 1st gen iPad is not the same as an iPhone 4. The iPad has half the memory of the iPhone for one. There is also the iPod touch 4th gen with the same amount of memory, but it's also not running a 3G stack at the same time (like the iPad 3G would also be doing).

As I said earlier -- engineering products involves lots of tradeoffs. Just because someone was able to make a jailbroken iPad use Retina graphics does not mean that it will equally work as well for all users. Just because Apple decided to not enable Retina graphics (for either technical or non-technical reasons) doesn't mean that Apple is a bunch of greedy monopolists. That's just not how things work in general.

I speculated on a few reasons why Apple might not have enabled Retina iPhone apps on the original iPad and iPad 2 -- there are probably other reasons that contributed to Apple's decision. Apple may have even had it up and running internally before deciding to kill that feature. But in no way does the lack of that feature or that it "works just fine" on jailbroken devices serve as evidence that Apple was trying to keep the older iPads behind so they could sell more hardware.

----------

I noticed a few days ago on my iPad 2 that some iPhone apps run at 2x had crisper (presumably iPhone retina) graphics. I assumed that this was something apple pushed in the latest iOS update that came out the same time as the new iPad.[/url]

That difference is caused when app developers use higher res images, but then name them as if they are 1x and tell the OS to scale down the images. On all iPads, when the 2x mode is enabled, any images drawn in that way will use the full resolution of the image instead.

This is not the recommended way by Apple since those larger images use more memory on the older devices. Any non-Retina display iPhone/iPod touch would never use the extra pixels in those images. But it just happens to be that Apple's iPad 2x mode does. But this is strictly an implementation detail that is not documented as far as I can tell anywhere by Apple. Some apps use this to their benefit, though. I remember early versions of Carcassonne would use this on the iPad before the app went universal, for example.

 

[dotslashlycos]

That difference is caused when app developers use higher res images, but then name them as if they are 1x and tell the OS to scale down the images.

That makes sense as the same graphics in the same app at 1x appear as though they've been pixel reduced. I guess taking advantage of this undocumented "bug/feature" would allow an app developer a means to write an app which would look good on all "Retina" iPhones/iPods as well as the original iPad and iPad2. Older iPhones/iPods would see a pixel reduced, but theoretically functional version. Thanks for the insight!

 

[Moonjumper]

I have none , can anyone give reason why you would?

I use a few iPhone apps on my iPad 1 for various reasons.

Met Office because there is no iPad version (this weather app might be UK only).

World Series of Poker because the the iPad version has fancy graphics on the cards, so the red suits look alike on a quick glance, and so do the black suits. So the playability is better on the iPhone version, even with the low res graphics.

Osmos because I bought the iPhone version before I had an iPad. I'm not buying it again.

If was using Rightmove more often I would try the iPhone version because the iPad version has fewer features and crashes a lot.

 

[perealb]

Apple decide not to take use of the retina graphics, until the release of the new iPad, because it would discourage developers from making native iPad apps.

Apple is smart. In the end, everybody benefits; the end user, the developers and Apple itself.

 

[The Phazer]

Nice. And you guys find this out right after I pay 6.99 for Plants vs Zombies HD.

I really can't understand why PVZ HD is still in the store at this point - you pay extra money for an app that has less features and actually looks worse than the iPhone version.

Phazer

 

[tdream]

There are a few reasons why the new iPad would do this and the old one doesn't. The most basic reason is that on Retina displays, apps run with Retina assets if available. Non-Retina displays never use Retina assets. In this regard, the new iPad is behaving exactly the same way as the old ones.

Second, if Apple did decide to use the Retina graphics for 2x mode on older iPads, it would introduce a few problems. One is that the original iPad is memory starved as it is. It came with 256MB and it wasn't until the iPhone 4 with it's Retina display did Apple bump up the RAM to 512MB. Second, should Apple use the Retina graphics for both the 1x and 2x modes? If they do, they are wasting CPU and battery to produce pixels that will only be scaled down. If they don't, they would need to come up with a way for apps to switch between 1x and 2x mode at runtime (they currently can't -- there is nothing in the API to even allow for that possibility). Also there is the issue of how the graphics would look when you take Retina graphics and scale them back down to 1x -- it's not nearly as nice as simply using the 1x graphics already.

One more thing to consider -- when the original iPad came out, there were no Retina display devices. All iPhone apps were 1x apps. The pixel doubling mode of the original iPad was just a way to allow iPhone apps to take up more of the screen than they would otherwise. Clearly Apple's goal was to have more iPad native/Universal apps. Spending engineering resources to make "legacy" apps run better is typically not a good use of time. Turning on Retina support on the new iPad for iPhone apps didn't require a large amount of engineering time. In fact, due to how the iOS APIs work, it may have not even required any time to get it up and running. Just the time required to verify that it did work okay.

The fact that this got so many upvotes because it has a large amount of text in it shows how stupid many users there are at macrumors. iPad 1 can EASILY run iPhone retina apps in their native resolution. People with jailbroken iPad 1s have been doing it for ages with Retinapad.

Ergo the rest of your argument continues in the same nonsensical vein.

 

[gatortpk]

1. The ipod touch 4th gen has a 960x540 display, but only has 256mb ram. Everything works fine on that, so why not on the ipad?
2.Valid problem. How about they let the user choose with a setting or something. You could either set it to run like it currently does, in low res mode, or chose 960x540 mode and then disable the 1x/2x button. That is what retina pad does, and it works fine.
3. But now they have spent the time. All they would need to do is port it to the ipad 1's ios firmware for the next update.

You make a good point, that iPod Touch (4th generation) does only have 256 MB of RAM and does run Retina Apps. By the way, the resolution is the same as the iPhone 4 and 4S, 960x640. (Not 960x540)

 

[KingJosh]

Unbelievable. Puzzled how this is possible.

 

[SeaFox]

I'm not understanding why the iPad uses something as simple (and crappy) as pixel-doubling. It should be easily powerful enough to use a real resizing algorithm on images that are not the native resolution of the screen.

Sounds like Apple trying to steer people into making new higher-res versions of their apps when a upscaled one would really be fine.

 

[manu chao]

true, though does anyone actually use iPhone apps in 1x mode on their iPad? They should just have a "force 2x" mode and use Retina graphics.

do a lot of people have many iPhone apps on their iPads? I have none, so wouldn't benefit from this feature. I don't know of many people who do as well.

Can you tell me any reason not to install all my iPhone apps on my iPad? (Except naturally for those that have separate iPad apps, but those are rare most offer universal apps instead.) Having them available in 1x (2x) mode is better than not having them.

There are tons of apps that would hardly profit from an iPad version because they require only some very simple controls and do not display much information. For example:
- NetAwake, open the app hit the name of the computer you want to wake up, done. Unless you have a large list of computers to wake up there is basically zero benefit in an iPad app or in running it in 2x mode.
- Speakers (Airfoil), activates your iOS as an Airplay-like speaker selectable as output device for audio. Again, an iPad app (or 2x) mode would add zero to its functionality or useability.
- Basically any audio-streaming app

 

[Tinmania]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9B176 Safari/7534.48.3)





This would be valid if there wasn't already a way to do this if you are jailbroken. This fact invalidates a lot of your post.

Exactly. And RetinaPad does it even on an iPad 1.




Michael

 

[MythicFrost]

There's a couple of reasons why Apple doesn't allow apps to run with retina graphics at 960x640 on the iPad 1 & 2:


1) Apple's not going to have the iPad 1 & 2 running iPhone apps at 960x640 with retina graphics, and then have the iPad 3 running iPhone apps at 480x320 with retina graphics. I suppose they could have it run at 960x640 (1920x1280) as well on the iPad 3, but see point #2.

2) Apple doesn't want developers getting lazy and not making native iPad versions. iPhone apps are supposed to be horrible to use, but usable if absolutely necessary, to encourage developers to produce native iPad versions.

 

[JAT]

This would be valid if there wasn't already a way to do this if you are jailbroken. This fact invalidates a lot of your post.

Is the iPad 3 using hardware scaling or still in software? That's the only possible difference.

 

[twoodcc]

yeah i noticed that apps look better on my new iPad. makes sense

 

[newyorksole]

I'm very confused.