The leaks continue to pile up as we approach September 9. Are there any real surprises in store for what the new iPhones will look like? That we will know in a week.
What will take longer is to see how app designers adapt to the new screen sizes that we expect the iPhone 6 and 6L to introduce. I talked to five top iOS designers to get a preview of the shape of apps to come.
John Gruber of Daring Fireball "calculated" screen resolutions for the two new devices. It is likely that they are accurate to what
The gist of Gruber's formulations are about the radical difference between the two new screen formats. The 4.7-inch iPhone 6 will maintain the same scale and resolution as the current iPhone 5 line, but have room for 38% more content. The 5.5-inch iPhone 6L will have 3x retina graphics, a slight increase in scale and room for 68% more content. How will app designers respond to increased real estate and higher resolution graphics?
Games aside, there are two major types of apps that designers will have to adapt for this new environment. Most content apps will make use of the larger screens to display (surprise!) more content. Most utility apps will scale their UI elements to fit the new dimensions. All the designers I talked to did not think they would make optimizations for the iPhone 6 alone.
Michael Mamiye, designer of the Gist news summary app (see above), is in the content camp. He thinks that, "Most developers will simply expand the frame of their apps, as opposed to actually using the new pixels for more features." As for Gist, he plans, "To use the new space for additional content (more articles, larger font, etc.)." He thinks that the best "games and productivity apps will undoubtedly decide to use this new space for more creative purposes, such as new features." He concedes that once iPhone 6-optimized apps are in use, "I may see some new and creative ways to utilize the larger space that I just haven’t thought of yet."
Mamiye's app is text-based with a strong news feel. Other content apps that rely more on images will have some greater challenges. Luke Wroblewski, designer of the Polar app (image above), sees a lot of work in his immediate future. There are, "likely more changes we have to make vs. want to make," he offers. As expected, variable sizing of UI elements will be a must. "If we’re dealing with wider screens, we’ll have to add flexibility into many of our elements. [and] If 3x [resolution] is true, we have a lot of images to remake." The real rub is that Polar allows users to search for and upload images as part of the poll-making process. "Images in our polls in particular might be tough as they are sized specifically for current screen dimensions." Any apps that display user generated content will have to be particularly sensitive to the demands of 3x graphics.
Utility or productivity apps have different challenges. Both Phill Ryu's Clear todo list app (see above) and Amid Moradganjeh's Peek calendar app (see below) are minimalist gems that engage the whole screen. For these apps, the larger screen sizes present usability issues. Moradganjeh thinks Peek is already designed with larger screens in mind. "I don't think we need to change the size of the UI elements or add new features, the current trend is to make the interfaces simplest and cleaner (truly mobile)." As far as the difficulties that larger screens create for top navigations, he says, "I think we will see more of the gestures for navigation. Gestures are independent of the navigation buttons and this can solve the problem with top navigation bar for large screens."
Ryu agrees about the use of gestures and also sees the emergence of a big-screen-first design method. "Almost immediately, new apps will be designed for the larger screens first, and then scaled down to support older devices. The differences in the end experiences on either sized screens will be very subtle for most users. They will mostly center around ‘you can see more of the content at a time and you have to scroll less’ on the larger screens, vs. interacting with these apps differently."
For Moradganjeh the issue of resolution does raise some intriguing possibilities. He thinks that more pixels will enable multi-layering in design. "Higher resolution makes it easier to have more layers of info and yet make them easy to recognize." He also thinks thise screens can provide more accurate feedback. "Higher resolution means more subtle yet richer visual feedback to actions on screen."
Jeremy Olson, designer of the Hours time-tracking app (see above), thinks it is already well-suited for the new iPhones. Most of the action in the app occurs within the bottom two-thirds of the screen. The timeline above the stack of project timers provides visual feedback about your day. It is click and swipe-able, but all its functionality is accessible through the timers. And, Olson has reserved the topmost navigation bar for secondary tasks.
Olson echoes what all the designers said, that careful testing is a must. "We will definitely be going through Hours and testing it at those screen sizes in the simulator to see how things look." They built the current app according to Apple's best practices, but checking is always necessary for each new iOS release. "We will make sure that we are implementing auto-layout in a way that everything looks great on the bigger screen sizes."
One other thing all the designers seemed to agree on was that the impact of the new Swift programming language will be minimal. Olson says, "in my use of Swift I didn’t see any obvious features that would make developing size-agnostic apps easier." Moradganjeh is more opinionated. "It will take a year or so before Swift is well received and it will make it easier for developing simpler apps only." General purpose apps may become less expensive to produce. Hype to the contrary, the economics of iOS app building will not change radically because of Swift.
