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Nobody designs for small iPhone devices anymore

466 points by dirtylowprofile 6y ago

sdfhbdf 6y ago
Is iPhone 12 mini considered small? I rock it and i can't seem to share the annoyances that the author mentions.
- dep_b 6y ago
  Because the mini has the same amount of pt’s as the iPhone X. Take a good look: everything’s smaller.
- mattgreenrocks 6y ago
  I sometimes see stuff like this on my 12 mini. Ridiculous. Almost always it’s a website though.
daviddavis 6y ago
I was considering upgrading to an iPhone 12 mini. Does it have these issues too?
- tomger 6y ago
  No
- gridder 6y ago
  It does but a lot less. Go for it, it’s a great phone.
weejewel 6y ago
If you think this is bad, try the first iPhone SE.
- fouc 6y ago
  I'm still using the iPhone SE (2016) as my daily driver. I find overall it's fine, only occasionally does a button get cut off by the screen size with no recourse.
  - dijit 6y ago
    Just a few times a button has been unreachable because of this. Hasn’t happened with the iPhone 12 mini yet, but, it is a markedly larger phone with a significantly larger screen.
  - endemic 6y ago
    I’ve been confused by the “share” window where the screen dimensions cut content off perfectly, and there is no scroll indicator, so you don’t realize there’s more to the UI.
    - formerly_proven 6y ago
      GDPR "consent" popups are sometimes not usable on the first gen SE, because some of them position: absolute with a fixed size that's larger than the screen. Coincidentally, the "Accept all" button is always reachable, with the "Settings" or "Deny most" button conveniently located below the unreachable fold.
      - captn3m0 6y ago
        I just read most stuff on Firefox Reader mode. No way to click those popupas cleanly on my phone.
    - SilasX 6y ago
      Or Facebook photo preview where it cuts off the bottom until you open it to full, and no indicator it’s cut off except your own experience with crappy cutoffs. That often changes the meaning of pictures/memes.
  - whitebread 6y ago
    Same here, my iPhone SE (2016) is still going strong and I can't remember the last time I stumbled upon an app that gave me enough sizing issues to become frustrating. What I would've given for the 2020 SE to be the same size as the 2016, being able to do everything on my phone one-handed is such a nice perk.
vbezhenar 6y ago
That was the case when I owned iPhone 4S. I think that around iOS 9 it was poorly usable partially because developers ignored its dimensions. That's a pity. I still think that 3.5" is the best smartphone size and I would pay good money to buy modern smartphone with good internals. But it does not make sense, even if some Android manufacturer would create it, apps and websites will ruin it.
- pmlnr 6y ago
  > I still think that 3.5" is the best smartphone size There were two phones I owned which I loved from every possible perspective: an Ericsson T29s[^1], and the HTC Desire[^2]. This latter had a 3.7" screen, physical buttons, and an optical tracball, and it was glorious as a phone. Oh, and it actually fit in a hand, or a pocket. Everything else I had since then - Nexus 4, Galaxy S4, Nomu S10, Moto E5 - are all way too big, but nobody seems to be doing any decent phones ~4" any more, which is a shame. Current "phones" used to be called phablets in 2012. [^1]: https://www.gsmarena.com/ericsson_t29s-225.php https://www.gsmarena.com/ericsson_t29s-225.php [^2]: https://www.gsmarena.com/htc_desire-3077.php https://www.gsmarena.com/htc_desire-3077.php
- aphextron 6y ago
  There's the new Palm phone[0], which is absolutely perfect in every way except for the fact that it runs Android. I would give anything for an iOS phone like this. [0] https://palm.com/pages/product https://palm.com/pages/product
  - vbezhenar 6y ago
    Thanks, that's really interesting product!
illwrks 6y ago
The main reason I had to get a new phone was because of apps not scaling correctly. And website visible areas being severely reduced due to ads and cookie notices etc...
andybak 6y ago
Really surprised this isn't caught in the App Store review process. Seems like a very low quality bar to aim for.
- matsemann 6y ago
  The only thing the review process is good for nowadays is to randomly ban apps by mistake, and make sure you're not taking payments without giving Apple their cut. The walled garden has for a long time failed to actually keep the quality up.
skohan 6y ago
Why would you? There are a tiny share of small screen size phones out there, and often you need a substantially different design for a small screen. Basically you are doubling the layout effort on your designers and app developers (or let's say 1.3 times modifier at least), and those designs have to be maintained as well. The alternative is to really have a "one size fits all" design, but this will likely mean making compromises on larger screens. Mobile development is expensive, and there's already enough to deal with to support backwards compatibility, and localization. It's just not economical to support small phones which almost nobody is using.
- forgotmypw17 6y ago
  why? pride in worksmanship, perhaps... because 1% is still quite a few users for whom the experience sucks... or perhaps just plain old empathy... because not every customer can just replace their device... or... i dunno... just avoiding someone posting embarrassing screenshots of one's app looking like shit on hacker news?
  - mattmanser 6y ago
    And then you make it suck for everyone else. Mobile first often made the experience suck for desktops. Tiny screen first just makes the experience suck for everyone. The author says: Also, I don’t care if the statistics for small devices is less than 1%, it’s just pure respect for those users. But that's a false dichotomy.
    - afavour 6y ago
      > Tiny screen first just makes the experience suck for everyone. No it doesn’t. iOS’s UI toolkit has numerous tools to allow a design to adapt to screen size. There’s no reason an adjustment for a smaller screen would have any effect on a larger one.
      - skohan 6y ago
        I'm quite sure all the screenshots in the article are the result of adaptive designs being broken due to edge cases. Constraint-based adaptive designs are great, but they have their limits. Unless you have a very simple design it is not going to work on every form factor.
cheeaun 6y ago
For Clubhouse app, it seems deliberate tho'. It looks cut-off on my iPhone 11 Pro too.
- alexlmiller 6y ago
  Yep, this is definitely an intentional design decision, it renders that way on all iPhones
iamben 6y ago
We've had this discussion on HN before and I'll make the same point, because this is very similar with responsive websites as well. All too often I see designs that don't think about odd size tablets, or (as here) phones less than 375 or 414, or whatever else. It absolutely boggles my mind, especially when you can attribute a "this is how much these users spend" amount to it (an ecom store, for instance). Most of the time it's not much extra effort to make it work properly (or even if you remove features, just keep it tidy), and absolutely worth it it real money terms.
- kawsper 6y ago
  > It absolutely boggles my mind, especially when you can attribute a "this is how much these users spend" amount to it (an ecom store, for instance). It also happens the other way around, they break it for odd-sized devices and then they go look at their numbers: "It's less than 1% of our revenue", WELL OF COURSE IT IS! It's broken!
  - iamben 6y ago
    Yeah, see that loads, very frustrating. "Desktop CVR is double that of a tablet, so we don't bother with tablets..."
  - mgkimsal 6y ago
    EXACTLY! And for some businesses, you may never get me back to try a redesign. That can also be used as justification - "those people won't come back again anyway". This was some of the same 'thinking' back in the 'designed for netscape / IE' wars of the late 90s. I would routinely hear that "we get more sales from IE users". And me saying "it's because we didn't test on netscape and the form submission is broken" didn't seem to register with anyone. I actually worked with one client who 'got it', and they were very particular that we tested with all major browsers of the day - they had multiple millions of dollars riding on orders coming in every month, and even small delays meant big ramifications down the line. It was almost all Netscape/IE, but we had to deal with multiple versions, and test accordingly, which wasn't trivial because they were trying to also add new JS functionality. We had a lot of user-agent testing at that time. :)
bluedino 6y ago
Here on HN, the username/score/logout links are triple stacked in the upper right and I’ve accidentally hit logout more times than I can count. iPhone 12 mini
- iamacyborg 6y ago
  I think that depends on your score. I’m on the 12 mini as well and those links are spread over two lines for me.
  - skohan 6y ago
    Unintentional privilege-based UI ergonomics
  - vulcan01 6y ago
    Problem is, they have one more digit in their karma than you...
- kergonath 6y ago
  I always tap the poster’s name when up- or down-voting a comment on my iPhone XR. HN’s UI in general is not great for phones (though at least it is simple and effective, which is great).
forgotmypw17 6y ago
I bet some developers do, the ones who care about quality and user experience. It's so counter-intuitive and ironic that the biggest applications with the biggest headcounts in their small percentage userbases spend the least amount of effort trying to accomodate them.
solarkraft 6y ago
> Also, I don’t care if the statistics for small devices is less than 1%, it’s just pure respect for those users. Thanks. This attutude of respect on the UI side is why I'm tempted by the Apple platform. Unfortunately it looks like it's not as perfect as hoped initially and there's a lot of disrespect on other ends.
- skohan 6y ago
  What's the cutoff? If you have a single user who's running iOS 7 and you have to slow down feature development 50% to support them, do you have to do that out of respect?
  - layer8 6y ago
    You should at least support what the latest devices support, e.g. iPhone 12 mini with Display Zoom turned on and large fonts. Incidentally, that will also mostly take care of the iPhone 5/5S/SE1 screen size. https://hacknicity.medium.com/how-ios-apps-adapt-to-the-various-iphone-12-screen-sizes-e45c021e1b8b https://hacknicity.medium.com/how-ios-apps-adapt-to-the-vari...
- formerly_proven 6y ago
  Apple devices are full of dark patterns (to get you to enable "upload everything always to iCloud") and bad UX. Even super basic stuff like the alarm clock ("bedtime") has become a Rube Goldberg-esque nightmare, and good UX elements have been replaced with garbage in other places as well. For example, setting the time of an alarm requires you to drag in a 5x5 mm area for hour and minute, respectively. Not only is that a way too small area for a touch interface, but you are also not seeing what you are setting it to. Utter garbage.
  - tinus_hn 6y ago
    Boo hoo. If it bothers you you can just type in the time, the large control got replaced by an enormous keyboard.
kawsper 6y ago
I have an original iPhone SE and I very rarely hit this, mostly by more amateurish applications, but it is still very frustrating when it happens. For an example there's an application I use to put money on my washing card, and also book washing machines in my building, and that doesn't work on my iPhone SE, even though that application is mostly a webview. It could be nice if Apple could detect these issues in the review process.
- RikNieu 6y ago
  It's weird that they don't. Every time I push to the istore they review it will multiple devices.
- irae 6y ago
  I held on to my original SE for as long as I could. I have dozens of screenshots similar to the ones on the article, and I was getting tired of reporting unusable or hard to use apps on small screens. This was one of the key factors for me to switch to the iPhone 12 Mini. And even though some apps still have issues, they just don't test bellow the regular 12 size. The worst recurring bug across apps that still happen on the mini is not having enough UI spacing to accommodate scrolling bellow the keyboard. I very often have apps that won't show the "submit" or whatever button to confirm a form.
  - mgkimsal 6y ago
    Similar here - I just went up to a 12 mini because the SE I had was... well - still worked, but I wanted to 'forward proof' myself a bit. I suspect it may not go past iOS 14 (I just upgraded - was on 12 for a long time). For things like banking, etc, I wanted to know my device will work for the next few years, and this is the smallest I can get that still is in the ios/apple world. I somewhat regret this, as I miss the Touch ID. Rumors are the 13 models will have a Touch ID under the screen, which will be great, but, I don't know they'll have a 'mini' version either. Apparently the 12 mini is being discontinued? I can't tell if that rumor is true, or production is just being reduced in favor of the larger models. Either way, the "small form factor" just seems to be an afterthought. Was reading a few viewpoints on this (perhaps it was even on HN?) some time ago, and ... one of the attractions of 'big screens' is that, for most people, that phone may be their only or primary internet access device. For me, I'm on laptops and large screens all day - I want small and conven ient and mobility in a phone, not large screens. If I want a large screen... I go to a large screen. I don't try to wrestle with getting a 7" device in to pockets to carry around with me. But people wanting 5" phones are apparently in a minority.
dreamer7 6y ago
This is not true. We still use my iPhone SE with a 4" screen as the primary testing device for our iOS app - https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/vendi-buy-sell-verified-phones/id1403906642 https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/vendi-buy-sell-verified-phones... There are many advantages to it. If it looks good on the SE, we can be reasonably sure it will look good on everything else (though this was affected by the introduction of the notch). Also, flagship iPhones can easily handle badly designed apps but my phone will show lag and artifacts while scrolling through an infinite scrolling screen.
- jiofih 6y ago
  Not true for you, true in general - “nobody” being just hyperbole.
- mgkimsal 6y ago
  Just upgraded from SE to 12 mini, but was hitting issues with testing a web app on my SE. I'd also kept it on ios 12, and all new 'large' devices were auto upgraded to iOS 14... hilarity ensued. We hit weird bugs that only showed up on iOS 14. But... in general, yeah, the size/space/perf issues are more easily spotted on a device like an SE. I re-optimized some JS - reduced memory, speed improvements - was far more noticeable on the SE than the newer flagship devices.
dep_b 6y ago
I used an iPhone SE 2016 until recently and I never really ran into situations where an app was unusable because of this. Also a lot of these design mistakes could be described as “reinventing UINavigationBar or UITabBar, crappy”. One thing that really annoyed me was doing an accidental shake gesture while typing something. The blocking Undo dialog’s buttons are covered by the keyboard and you cannot do anything but restart the app.
tinus_hn 6y ago
A big part of the problem is people just not following the guidelines. If you have a toolbar with buttons that have labels, it’s not going to fit. But if you’re following the guidelines, you don’t have labels and it fits. If you have a list with a refresh button on the bottom you have to scroll to see that button on a small screen. But if you use the standard pull to refresh control, you don’t even need the button. If you use these smart hamburger menu overlay or scroll controls, they look bad on untested devices. Don’t use hamburger menus. Most of the screenshots in this article are from iOS apps that show Google Material Design. It’s not too surprising this doesn’t work properly on Apple devices, the design doesn’t fit and you can’t implement it using the toolkit Apple designed, built and tested to work on all their devices. Edit: By the way you don’t even need to get a tiny phone to test this because most of the problems also show up when you increase the operating system font size which you’re also supposed to test.
- tyfon 6y ago
  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 if everyone followed the guidelines, used the standard UI elements and images etc it would be much better. I could even forgo button labels if that happens :)
  - chrismorgan 6y ago
    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.
    - tyfon 6y ago
      Yeah I used to be on android, I had less issues there. This is my first iPhone (version 11) and I'm not sure if I will keep with apple. The tracking of google is bothering me big time though so I might just accept a worse user experience to avoid that.
tannhaeuser 6y ago
Unfortunately, that includes Apple's own apps on 6s/7/8 iPhones. For example, the new [double-swipes right] "app library" or "app mediathek" or what it's called in your language overflows into the bottom. Or in iMessage, the context menu on a photo.
jdmoreira 6y ago
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 have handle smaller screens explicitly. As iOS developers stuck into this position we have grown to despise having to deal with smaller screens. It just feels like we can't win.
- ryandrake 6y ago
  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 larger for accessibility reasons? What if they are on an odd sized phone, or even one we haven't even seen yet?
  - daniellarusso 6y ago
    Exactly. It is just mediocre design.
chrismorgan 6y ago
The Google Maps thing isn’t entirely about screen size (though I would hope it wouldn’t be quite so bad on larger screens—but I’m only familiar with how it looks on a small-by-modern-standards Android phone, where it’s about the same as on the iPhone depicted in this article, or even a little less); it’s about the product’s overarching philosophy, which has changed over the past decade (in a direction I strongly dislike). It used to be about, y’know, maps, but maps are now incidental, a means to a different end, ably demonstrated by their icon change a year ago from a map to a location pin. It’s all about the destinations now, and mapping has progressively deteriorated and been deemphasised. At least in the case depicted, you should be able to get it to show just the map by tapping once in the map area. (If you’re interested in more about this, https://www.justinobeirne.com https://www.justinobeirne.com has some excellent long-form content analysing all the major maps products, how they’ve changed over time, &c. https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-new-app-icon https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-new-app-icon and https://www.justinobeirne.com/what-happened-to-google-maps https://www.justinobeirne.com/what-happened-to-google-maps are good brief starting points.)
- sfvisser 6y ago
  Google Maps is not much better on larger screens unfortunately. It’s almost as if it wants to obscure the map area, no matter what you try. When using it you kind of feel how a once pioneering piece of tech and UX initially built by a small team got taken over by corporate Google which knows best what their users need...
  - mleonhard 6y ago
    Google makes what will get the team members promoted. That is rarely what the users need.
- jiggawatts 6y ago
  While we're on the topic: YouTube, which is inherently a video content viewing service, goes out of its way to obscure the video content. The TV app, the mobile app, and the browser app all insist on overlaying the content with random garbage that no sane human being could possibly be more interested in that the content that they launched with the intention of watching! Heaven help you if you open a popular live feed. The wall of random teenage stream-of-thought noise streaming down across the video is just unspeakably crass. Why was this added, you ask? Because some overpaid manager at Google saw that Facebook was doing more video, so turning a video streaming service into a social network seemed like a brilliant idea. I mean why not? Why wouldn't people watching NASA feeds want snotty little kids spaming swearwords on their television? PS: products slowly morphing to become nigh unrecognisable is a pre-Internet issue. The MTV channel used to show just music videos!
polyrand 6y ago
I use an iPhone 8 (more or less the same as the SE 2020) and I don't find this bugs often, but they are definitely there. Regarding web design, I always set the iPhone 5/SE view as the baseline. I think it's a lot easier to go from there to a bigger device than the other way around. Also, the worst that can happen is that there's some empty spaces on the sides or some card gets wide. However, when you start from a big device and then try to fit the UI to smaller ones it's a lot harder. Another problem is the rendering engines. I once had to help a friend with a problem that was only happening in my iPhone, but when I used Chrome (in my laptop) with the mobile view it worked ok. I could then reproduce the bug using Safari (in my laptop) with the mobile view active, so I guess it was because of the small size + rendering engine. Those things are also hard to debug and catch.
chrismorgan 6y ago
On the web, people came up with the concept of “mobile-first”, meaning that you should first of all make sure everything can work with the smallest size, and then add whatever adjustments, improvements, extra functionality due to size, &c. for larger screens after that. (Of course, in practice people made a hash of it (as they always do) and it often became mobile-only design, with users of larger screens getting a comically bad experience that was manifestly designed for tiny screens; but that’s not the idea of mobile-first.) I’d say it’s generally a sound philosophy, even though at larger sizes you may desire to recompose the UI quite substantially. It’s generally easier and/or safer to design for small screens and reformat or add extras for larger screens, rather than to design for large screens and reformat or remove for smaller screens. But people definitely regularly don’t go small enough in their idea of “mobile”. I decided some years ago that I would target 300px as my baseline width, and I feel that’s served me well. (And if convenient, I make it work past 260px.) 300px is a bit smaller than anything mainstream, and is thus pretty safe. (I haven’t often done much that needs a baseline height, but I’d use 300px and/or 450px there, considering both portrait and landscape usage as necessary or applicable.)
- frosted-flakes 6y ago
  Something that I do that most people seem to miss is disable sticky headers below a certain height. It's super easy to do with a simple media query. I used to use a square-screened BlackBerry 10 device, and the number of websites that didn't do this was infuriating, and I made frequent use of a "Kill Sticky" bookmarklet. But everyone runs into this issue at some point just by turning their phone to landscape mode, which most web developers evidently don't test with.
  - germ 6y ago
    I came here to bring this up, I use a Key2 daily and have used a UniHertz Titan for a time. Many applications don't handle odd screen aspects very gracefully. (Like Instagram opting for zooming stories instead of lettering). But sticky headers are the bane of my existence.
some1else 6y ago
Switching the language to German also has interesting effects.
williesleg 6y ago
Fuck you, I do, I have tiny hands. This post is sizeist, you are hate speech against tiny hands
Black101 6y ago
I was using my computer on a ~50in TV and sites were showing me their mobile version... there's a lot broken (it was not that low of a resolution). Maybe the real question should be, why is software broken so badly?
jbverschoor 6y ago
Apple isn't checking apps anymore. They used to be pretty anal about many things. Unfortunately, even their own apps aren't checked completely anymore
tonetheman 6y ago
To take the opposite tack. If it is really only 1% of the people with iphones that you are messing up... that is a gamble I would take. This app will look good for 99% of the wallets who own this phone, the other 1% of the wallets have the cheap phone. By having the smaller device it implies (no matter if this is true or not) your spend will/could be less. To me IOS is such a closed inbred ecosystem apps SHOULD look good on all of the devices.
jbverschoor 6y ago
It's not just small screens. If you enable "Zoom", the aspect ratio changes, and most apps don't handle that properly. Same with following the global text-size settings
mabedan 6y ago
Try using apps with iPhone SE in German language. It’s rare occasion to be able to see a label fully displayed in the ui
tambourine_man 6y ago
> Well, if you’ve been rocking the iPhone SE 2020 you would know If you’ve been rocking the original SE you’d know even better. Such a shame, it’s the best size phone I’ve had.
- TrueGeek 6y ago
  Have you tried the new Mini? I switched from the Pro and love it.
  - layer8 6y ago
    I have, and it is noticeably heavier and less “thumbable” than the SE1 (and the screen scratches much more easily). The mini size is better than the 6/SE2, plus the return to flat edges, but it’s still a compromise in usability compared to the 5/SE1.
    - mgkimsal 6y ago
      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..
      - layer8 6y ago
        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.
        mgkimsal 6y ago
        I'd meant I considered an SE2, but didn't get it, because of the physical size.
izerik 6y ago
A lot of these aren't "small screen" problems, just bad/hacky coding, not doing things like apple recommends or not handling some edge cases, so they're simply just bugs. Clubhouse - maybe it's an issue that the UI on the right isn't disappearing completely, but maybe that's by design. Anyway, nothing is clipped/truncated Spotify - the "now plating" bar's height isn't added to the scrollview's content inset. Not a small screen issue since it's on the vertical axis and content is scrollable. Globe Telecom - yes, this could count as one (with the tabbar). CloudMd - that's just probably hardcoding the status bar's height, nothing is truncated/out of view. Foodpanda - that side menu is actually scrollable. y letter is cut off, ok. Nothing you can't access. Google Maps - this is a design decision, same ratio of map/list height on my iPhone XS. You can either view the map or the list in full screen Headspace - navigation/status bar issue, just bad coding local bank - yes, this counts as well Lalamove - yes, 2 textfields are too much Shortcuts - scroll up? I do agree that small screen devices aren't getting enough focus on this regard. edit: formatting
jariel 6y ago
The author made the wrong conclusion. Most of these are either by design or just UI bugs or poor design.
nottorp 6y ago
... and i don't view the second iphone se as small even. I have people in my family rocking the original iphone se because THAT is small enough for them.
mucholove 6y ago
My font size is set to a fairly large size. For many apps, I have no idea what to click on because no one follows the autolayout. Some (see Evernote) are so bad that I can’t even click the sign in button because the touch target seems to be on the text and the button only shows 2 letters. ¿Should I be outraged? So it goes...
- prox 6y ago
  A peeve of mine is the constant need to throw popups when you’ve just installed an app. “Want notifications? Please like us! Follow us on X” and the list goes on... Whatever happened to “don’t stop the proceedings” for user friendliness? If your app behaves like it has attachment issues, I don’t want it.
- alisonkisk 6y ago
  iPhone and Android. So many apps have text they don't fit within their colored backgrounds, and overflow or get cut off.
- ectopod 6y ago
  This isn't new. Back in 1992 you had two choices for DPI in Windows 3.1 but many applications couldn't cope with the larger setting. I used it anyway because 1024x768 on a 14" CRT was unreadable with regular fonts.
StrangeOrange 6y ago
That Clubhouse UI is the way it is generally. It is that way on my iPhone 8+ anyway. Best to check your hypotheses before writing them down as facts.
Xenoamorphous 6y ago
It’s particularly painful in the EU and with a 2016 iPhone SE like me. I’ve come across too many GDPR dialogs where it’s impossible to click any of the buttons.
PaulHoule 6y ago
The more I study UI systems the more I like Win95.
dbg31415 6y ago
Seeing a lot of issues here that would also be violations of WCAG guidelines, and thus be something you could bring an ADA accessibility suit against the companies over. https://medium.com/front-end-weekly/dominos-pizza-and-web-accessibility-laws-b76dc94f34f9 https://medium.com/front-end-weekly/dominos-pizza-and-web-ac... https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/07/dominos-supreme-court.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/07/dominos-supreme-court.html For all of your web projects... 90+ score in Lighthouse is a good bar to aim for. And look for any errors in Wave or Axe -- these should be part of your requirements (starting with requirements to the design team around contrast and colors they can use, as well as requirements to the devs), and part of your QA process. Call out issues you see. Compliance with WCAG (2.1, AA for most businesses https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21 https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21) is the de facto law of the land. https://wave.webaim.org/ https://wave.webaim.org/ https://www.deque.com/axe/ https://www.deque.com/axe/
- kps 6y ago
  I'm no fan of ADA ambulance chasers, but if they start going after mobile and web ‘designers’ my schadenfreude will be unermesslich.
  - dbg31415 5y ago
    > my schadenfreude will be unermesslich My new favorite set of words.
dade_ 6y ago
For me it was Google Maps on my iPhone SE, but that was several years ago. The great GUI design for the display size is what made the classic iPhone size work. Essentially Apple decided to allow apps to be published that were terrible on smaller devices and I realized those horses weren't going to get back into the barn. So I switched to a Samsung Flip, and I've learned that a device that has a large display and fits in my pocket is a reasonable compromise. Now they just need to be a reasonable price.
Davidbrcz 6y ago
Now you can imagine my pain as someone who is visually impaired and who had to increase all the sizes to the max to be able to read anything....
evolveyourmind 6y ago
The real problem is that designers usually focus on a single device without considering any other screen size
- BelleOfTheBall 6y ago
  This is in part because it's assumed that everyone will get the cool new model once it's out and, in particular with iPhones, there's a marketing push to acquire newer models, lest yours feels outdated or stops being supported by the company.
ArkanExplorer 6y ago
iPhone 7, iPhone 8, iPhone SE 2020 all share the same screen size and resolution - so isn't this a problem on those other devices as well? And for that matter so do iPhone 6 and 6S, which are still current as of iOS 14. iPhone 7 and up are still going to support iOS 15, so these devices will be with us for a while.
furr 6y ago
No one designs for IE6 anymore either. If it costs a lot more to support a platform that doesn't bring in money, it would be a terrible business decision. "This is losing is a LOT of money, but it would be a nice thing to do" is not realistic.
- hawos 6y ago
  The iPhone SE 2020 is hardly comparable to IE6.
  - Nailgun 6y ago
    With all of the annoyances that Safari ios provides, I genuinely consider it the spiritual successor to IE.
sebastien_b 6y ago
My favorite so far is my banking app asking a security question, with it being in a single-line field that truncates right at where it asks what information to provide. In fact, I think I'll upload it somewhere for this author to add to the list.
geniium 6y ago
Some are clearly mistakes from the builders, others are features. Come on stop bitching around and pick up some real apps.
bondolo 6y ago
The same problem exists on Android. I chose one size larger system font because I like to be able to read the screen with my glasses off and safely read the screen while I am driving. The result is UI regularly covered by the keyboard. Text clipping and text overflows. The tiny map problem mentioned in the article. As much as I want a smaller phone I fear that it would be unusable with the default UI and certainly if I chose to use increased text size.
fortran77 6y ago
I can understand Clubhouse. They don't care about people with old small phones--they're not influencers. But banks, drug stores, and things like Spotify should be paying attention to these things. Many businesses may out-source app development to people who just don't care about anything but "meeting the spec" but Spotify should know better.
brianzelip 6y ago
I start design at iPhone 5 (320px wide in portrait orientation). However, it will often work down to 300px or less.
gcb0 6y ago
"oh buy i gladly pay the apple tax and subject myself to a single apple store with draconian rules for quality products in the entire ecosystem"
crazygringo 6y ago
This feels... silly. Many of the examples have nothing to do with screen size (e.g. cutting off the bottom of letters or "so much white space"), or are intended ("Dang I can barely see the map" -- well yeah that's because the primary data is the list of results). Many other comments here are listing that many of the supposed issues are the same on large screens too. I used the original SE and then upgraded to the SE2 and none of this has been any kind of problem. In fact, almost all of these are great examples of responsive design. Even if you have to scroll a little or some ellipses are shown... they seem to all work. If this is the worst the author can find of small screens not working... then they seem to have proved the opposite point, that small screens are actually working great.
ruph123 6y ago
One thing that really annoyed me who always preferred the smaller iPhones like the SE: When Apple updated their Music app to make everything super big and bloated it basically got unusable. Especially for classical music where you could not see past the long name of the symphony to see which movement it was. And even while playing you had to wait for the running text to reach the important part. And all this was just blown up, they did not have to cram in a lot of infos they just increased the size of every UI element, made fonts bigger and bolt. It was really poor design, it felt like a phone for the elderly. Also one feature was gone that the old Music app had which would've helped here: hold down on a song to get the overlay of the whole name... In general classical music is really poorly supported by many music services and apps but this was such a huge annoyance that I had to switch to a third party app and delete that shitty Music app.
- bouke 6y ago
  Yeah that’s what bothering me as well. Seems to be happening everywhere though, reduced information density and increased whitespace and fonts. So as we’re all buying something with bigger screens, we still keep loosing real estate.
brundolf 6y ago
Wait this is the 2020 SE? I.e. an iPhone 8, not even the older one? I'm even more surprised because the Mini exists now as a first-class citizen. Apple has historically been good about making sure all approved apps provide a good experience on all the devices that they should; I wonder why they've dropped the ball on this one
rojcyk 6y ago
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://www.figma.com/community/plugin/732240841094697441/Viewports https://www.figma.com/community/plugin/732240841094697441/Vi... But developers do the very same thing and as often as designers. Just further down the pipeline. 2. Not supporting the smallest possible devices like the original SE is a reasonable business decision. It is not even making it into the charts at all the products I'm currently working on. It is simply not worth the effort (since the effort is not as insignificant as people here say). 3. Supporting the smallest devices is definitely not free. And it has a real monetary, technological and UX cost. It costs a lot of money to properly test, report, design, and implement every possible edge case for every possible viewports. Developers HATE creating special layouts or cases for specific devices (speaking about native mobile development) and if I recall correctly, Apple might even prohibit it. And lastly, design is about making the best possible solution, for the biggest amount of people. Quite often you will find yourself in a situation where you have to decide whether you will vastly improve the experience for the 99% of people and make the experience not ideal for the 1% or vice versa. Which is the better call? 4. Blaming it all on designers is just too harsh. Yes, not everyone is perfect, and designers often miss it, but more often than not it is a simple business decisions. Designers can decide to ditch a certain viewport because it can benefit the majority, the same way developers decide to drop certain OS support.
- brundolf 6y ago
  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 <1% of iPhone users, especially considering how long iPhones last. My parents are still doing fine with their 6Ses. Edit: I was wrong about the mini being smaller; it's somewhat larger than the 8/SE
Adrig 6y ago
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.
- pmlnr 6y ago
  > Negative space is good Yeah, no. There's spacing, and there's useless void - negative space is usually being the latter. Websites becoming ridiculous on computers, because everyone keeps designing for fat greasy fingers, and this trend is absolutely horrible.
  - Adrig 6y ago
    You know that a proper website is designed differently at different breakpoints right? What you see on a computer screen is not designed based on fingers taps. Of course there are cases where it's taken too far. Not arguing that there isn't bad design out there. But again, negative space is good. It's proven better for comprehension and accessibility
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - Daho0n 6y ago
    You just proved his point though.
mro_name 6y ago
I do. Habit shapes creation. I use an SE and naturally design & build for it. (Plug: https://mro.name/ShaarliOS 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.
- DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
  > 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.
  - mro_name 6y ago
    I'm a big fan of static builds. But cannot understand how a 15MB test IPA becomes a 70MB production IPA and takes 300MB to upload. That's IMO software explosion and bloat as Niklaus Wirth ranted on decades ago.
HumblyTossed 6y ago
How do these apps get by Apple's highly regarded, industry leading, 30% worthy, approval process?
bambataa 6y ago
I get frustrated on my iPhone SE by apps that have me fill in a field but then no “done” button to close the keyboard. Between the keyboard and the app’s overly large heading, there’s barely any space to click anything else to close the keyboard without triggering something else. Cronometer is bad for this.
aaronbrethorst 6y ago
I do all of my iOS development on an iPhone SE simulator. No, not the iPhone SE 2020, the original one. Scaling designs up to an X class device is much easier than trying to scale down.
mouzogu 6y ago
There's too many devices and screens/orientations to handle. It's a hassle. Mobile-first was an approach to fix this but pragmatism usually dictates otherwise.
jonas21 6y ago
In the first example (Clubhouse), it's a deliberate design decision to show the edge of the cards on the left as an affordance that you can swipe to get back to the main content. The Google Maps example is probably because most people want to see the list of results when you search for a category of businesses - the map is secondary. If you do want to see more map, you can just pull down on that handle at the top of the list or press the "View Larger Map" button. Many of the other examples seem somewhat nitpicky, so I don't really think this supports the argument that nobody is designing for small devices.
riantogo 6y ago
I'm humbled by the effort required to create good UI that works well everywhere. That is why I decided to use stock bootstrap with minimal changes. The designer tried to customize it (causing flaws on certain screen sizes). I had them roll it all back to strict use of bootstrap classes. I'm okay with the limitations imposed. Atleast it is functional everywhere.
sharkjacobs 6y ago
Gosh, if only there was some kind of curated App Store run by Apple which only sold apps which had been reviewed and vetted by human beings who could check for this kind of thing.
- Daho0n 6y ago
  Since many comments here says how Apple's own apps have the same problems, that wouldn't do any difference even if the app store was actually curated for quality and not control.
vertis 6y ago
I find it strange that these big companies aren't testing across a broad range of devices. I'm a solo freelancer, but the last app I built for a client, I actually went out and bought an iPhone SE, because that was the minimum spec. Granted I don't load it onto that phone often, but I checked that it worked as expected, and the layout behaved reasonably. An iPhone SE (not 2020) will set you back less than $100. Anything that teenagers use (e.g. Spotify) you have to assume it'll be run across all kinds of budget devices.
FractalHQ 6y ago
I blame the CSS spec for not giving us responsive text sizes. It’s 2021, the Internet was literally built on text, and we still can’t have text that automatically grows and shrinks based on the size of its parent. We can go to Mars, but we can’t have responsive text. Blows my mind.
cdeutsch 5y ago
1Password on my original iPhone SE is a train wreck. It often doesn't show the button to enable biometric unlock, so I'm constantly having to type the full password

sdfhbdf 6y ago

Is iPhone 12 mini considered small? I rock it and i can't seem to share the annoyances that the author mentions.

dep_b 6y ago
Because the mini has the same amount of pt’s as the iPhone X. Take a good look: everything’s smaller.
mattgreenrocks 6y ago
I sometimes see stuff like this on my 12 mini. Ridiculous. Almost always it’s a website though.

daviddavis 6y ago

I was considering upgrading to an iPhone 12 mini. Does it have these issues too?

tomger 6y ago
No
gridder 6y ago
It does but a lot less. Go for it, it’s a great phone.

weejewel 6y ago

If you think this is bad, try the first iPhone SE.

fouc 6y ago
I'm still using the iPhone SE (2016) as my daily driver. I find overall it's fine, only occasionally does a button get cut off by the screen size with no recourse.
- dijit 6y ago
  Just a few times a button has been unreachable because of this. Hasn’t happened with the iPhone 12 mini yet, but, it is a markedly larger phone with a significantly larger screen.
- endemic 6y ago
  I’ve been confused by the “share” window where the screen dimensions cut content off perfectly, and there is no scroll indicator, so you don’t realize there’s more to the UI.
  - formerly_proven 6y ago
    GDPR "consent" popups are sometimes not usable on the first gen SE, because some of them position: absolute with a fixed size that's larger than the screen. Coincidentally, the "Accept all" button is always reachable, with the "Settings" or "Deny most" button conveniently located below the unreachable fold.
    - captn3m0 6y ago
      I just read most stuff on Firefox Reader mode. No way to click those popupas cleanly on my phone.
  - SilasX 6y ago
    Or Facebook photo preview where it cuts off the bottom until you open it to full, and no indicator it’s cut off except your own experience with crappy cutoffs. That often changes the meaning of pictures/memes.
- whitebread 6y ago
  Same here, my iPhone SE (2016) is still going strong and I can't remember the last time I stumbled upon an app that gave me enough sizing issues to become frustrating. What I would've given for the 2020 SE to be the same size as the 2016, being able to do everything on my phone one-handed is such a nice perk.

vbezhenar 6y ago

That was the case when I owned iPhone 4S. I think that around iOS 9 it was poorly usable partially because developers ignored its dimensions. That's a pity. I still think that 3.5" is the best smartphone size and I would pay good money to buy modern smartphone with good internals. But it does not make sense, even if some Android manufacturer would create it, apps and websites will ruin it.

pmlnr 6y ago
> I still think that 3.5" is the best smartphone size There were two phones I owned which I loved from every possible perspective: an Ericsson T29s[^1], and the HTC Desire[^2]. This latter had a 3.7" screen, physical buttons, and an optical tracball, and it was glorious as a phone. Oh, and it actually fit in a hand, or a pocket. Everything else I had since then - Nexus 4, Galaxy S4, Nomu S10, Moto E5 - are all way too big, but nobody seems to be doing any decent phones ~4" any more, which is a shame. Current "phones" used to be called phablets in 2012. [^1]: https://www.gsmarena.com/ericsson_t29s-225.php https://www.gsmarena.com/ericsson_t29s-225.php [^2]: https://www.gsmarena.com/htc_desire-3077.php https://www.gsmarena.com/htc_desire-3077.php
aphextron 6y ago
There's the new Palm phone[0], which is absolutely perfect in every way except for the fact that it runs Android. I would give anything for an iOS phone like this. [0] https://palm.com/pages/product https://palm.com/pages/product
- vbezhenar 6y ago
  Thanks, that's really interesting product!

illwrks 6y ago

The main reason I had to get a new phone was because of apps not scaling correctly. And website visible areas being severely reduced due to ads and cookie notices etc...

andybak 6y ago

Really surprised this isn't caught in the App Store review process. Seems like a very low quality bar to aim for.

matsemann 6y ago
The only thing the review process is good for nowadays is to randomly ban apps by mistake, and make sure you're not taking payments without giving Apple their cut. The walled garden has for a long time failed to actually keep the quality up.

skohan 6y ago

Why would you? There are a tiny share of small screen size phones out there, and often you need a substantially different design for a small screen. Basically you are doubling the layout effort on your designers and app developers (or let's say 1.3 times modifier at least), and those designs have to be maintained as well. The alternative is to really have a "one size fits all" design, but this will likely mean making compromises on larger screens. Mobile development is expensive, and there's already enough to deal with to support backwards compatibility, and localization. It's just not economical to support small phones which almost nobody is using.

forgotmypw17 6y ago
why? pride in worksmanship, perhaps... because 1% is still quite a few users for whom the experience sucks... or perhaps just plain old empathy... because not every customer can just replace their device... or... i dunno... just avoiding someone posting embarrassing screenshots of one's app looking like shit on hacker news?
- mattmanser 6y ago
  And then you make it suck for everyone else. Mobile first often made the experience suck for desktops. Tiny screen first just makes the experience suck for everyone. The author says: Also, I don’t care if the statistics for small devices is less than 1%, it’s just pure respect for those users. But that's a false dichotomy.
  - afavour 6y ago
    > Tiny screen first just makes the experience suck for everyone. No it doesn’t. iOS’s UI toolkit has numerous tools to allow a design to adapt to screen size. There’s no reason an adjustment for a smaller screen would have any effect on a larger one.
    - skohan 6y ago
      I'm quite sure all the screenshots in the article are the result of adaptive designs being broken due to edge cases. Constraint-based adaptive designs are great, but they have their limits. Unless you have a very simple design it is not going to work on every form factor.

cheeaun 6y ago

For Clubhouse app, it seems deliberate tho'. It looks cut-off on my iPhone 11 Pro too.

alexlmiller 6y ago
Yep, this is definitely an intentional design decision, it renders that way on all iPhones

iamben 6y ago

We've had this discussion on HN before and I'll make the same point, because this is very similar with responsive websites as well. All too often I see designs that don't think about odd size tablets, or (as here) phones less than 375 or 414, or whatever else. It absolutely boggles my mind, especially when you can attribute a "this is how much these users spend" amount to it (an ecom store, for instance). Most of the time it's not much extra effort to make it work properly (or even if you remove features, just keep it tidy), and absolutely worth it it real money terms.

kawsper 6y ago
> It absolutely boggles my mind, especially when you can attribute a "this is how much these users spend" amount to it (an ecom store, for instance). It also happens the other way around, they break it for odd-sized devices and then they go look at their numbers: "It's less than 1% of our revenue", WELL OF COURSE IT IS! It's broken!
- iamben 6y ago
  Yeah, see that loads, very frustrating. "Desktop CVR is double that of a tablet, so we don't bother with tablets..."
- mgkimsal 6y ago
  EXACTLY! And for some businesses, you may never get me back to try a redesign. That can also be used as justification - "those people won't come back again anyway". This was some of the same 'thinking' back in the 'designed for netscape / IE' wars of the late 90s. I would routinely hear that "we get more sales from IE users". And me saying "it's because we didn't test on netscape and the form submission is broken" didn't seem to register with anyone. I actually worked with one client who 'got it', and they were very particular that we tested with all major browsers of the day - they had multiple millions of dollars riding on orders coming in every month, and even small delays meant big ramifications down the line. It was almost all Netscape/IE, but we had to deal with multiple versions, and test accordingly, which wasn't trivial because they were trying to also add new JS functionality. We had a lot of user-agent testing at that time. :)

bluedino 6y ago

Here on HN, the username/score/logout links are triple stacked in the upper right and I’ve accidentally hit logout more times than I can count. iPhone 12 mini

iamacyborg 6y ago
I think that depends on your score. I’m on the 12 mini as well and those links are spread over two lines for me.
- skohan 6y ago
  Unintentional privilege-based UI ergonomics
- vulcan01 6y ago
  Problem is, they have one more digit in their karma than you...
kergonath 6y ago
I always tap the poster’s name when up- or down-voting a comment on my iPhone XR. HN’s UI in general is not great for phones (though at least it is simple and effective, which is great).

forgotmypw17 6y ago

I bet some developers do, the ones who care about quality and user experience. It's so counter-intuitive and ironic that the biggest applications with the biggest headcounts in their small percentage userbases spend the least amount of effort trying to accomodate them.

solarkraft 6y ago

> Also, I don’t care if the statistics for small devices is less than 1%, it’s just pure respect for those users. Thanks. This attutude of respect on the UI side is why I'm tempted by the Apple platform. Unfortunately it looks like it's not as perfect as hoped initially and there's a lot of disrespect on other ends.

skohan 6y ago
What's the cutoff? If you have a single user who's running iOS 7 and you have to slow down feature development 50% to support them, do you have to do that out of respect?
- layer8 6y ago
  You should at least support what the latest devices support, e.g. iPhone 12 mini with Display Zoom turned on and large fonts. Incidentally, that will also mostly take care of the iPhone 5/5S/SE1 screen size. https://hacknicity.medium.com/how-ios-apps-adapt-to-the-various-iphone-12-screen-sizes-e45c021e1b8b https://hacknicity.medium.com/how-ios-apps-adapt-to-the-vari...
formerly_proven 6y ago
Apple devices are full of dark patterns (to get you to enable "upload everything always to iCloud") and bad UX. Even super basic stuff like the alarm clock ("bedtime") has become a Rube Goldberg-esque nightmare, and good UX elements have been replaced with garbage in other places as well. For example, setting the time of an alarm requires you to drag in a 5x5 mm area for hour and minute, respectively. Not only is that a way too small area for a touch interface, but you are also not seeing what you are setting it to. Utter garbage.
- tinus_hn 6y ago
  Boo hoo. If it bothers you you can just type in the time, the large control got replaced by an enormous keyboard.

kawsper 6y ago

I have an original iPhone SE and I very rarely hit this, mostly by more amateurish applications, but it is still very frustrating when it happens. For an example there's an application I use to put money on my washing card, and also book washing machines in my building, and that doesn't work on my iPhone SE, even though that application is mostly a webview. It could be nice if Apple could detect these issues in the review process.

RikNieu 6y ago
It's weird that they don't. Every time I push to the istore they review it will multiple devices.
irae 6y ago
I held on to my original SE for as long as I could. I have dozens of screenshots similar to the ones on the article, and I was getting tired of reporting unusable or hard to use apps on small screens. This was one of the key factors for me to switch to the iPhone 12 Mini. And even though some apps still have issues, they just don't test bellow the regular 12 size. The worst recurring bug across apps that still happen on the mini is not having enough UI spacing to accommodate scrolling bellow the keyboard. I very often have apps that won't show the "submit" or whatever button to confirm a form.
- mgkimsal 6y ago
  Similar here - I just went up to a 12 mini because the SE I had was... well - still worked, but I wanted to 'forward proof' myself a bit. I suspect it may not go past iOS 14 (I just upgraded - was on 12 for a long time). For things like banking, etc, I wanted to know my device will work for the next few years, and this is the smallest I can get that still is in the ios/apple world. I somewhat regret this, as I miss the Touch ID. Rumors are the 13 models will have a Touch ID under the screen, which will be great, but, I don't know they'll have a 'mini' version either. Apparently the 12 mini is being discontinued? I can't tell if that rumor is true, or production is just being reduced in favor of the larger models. Either way, the "small form factor" just seems to be an afterthought. Was reading a few viewpoints on this (perhaps it was even on HN?) some time ago, and ... one of the attractions of 'big screens' is that, for most people, that phone may be their only or primary internet access device. For me, I'm on laptops and large screens all day - I want small and conven ient and mobility in a phone, not large screens. If I want a large screen... I go to a large screen. I don't try to wrestle with getting a 7" device in to pockets to carry around with me. But people wanting 5" phones are apparently in a minority.

dreamer7 6y ago

This is not true. We still use my iPhone SE with a 4" screen as the primary testing device for our iOS app - https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/vendi-buy-sell-verified-phones/id1403906642 https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/vendi-buy-sell-verified-phones... There are many advantages to it. If it looks good on the SE, we can be reasonably sure it will look good on everything else (though this was affected by the introduction of the notch). Also, flagship iPhones can easily handle badly designed apps but my phone will show lag and artifacts while scrolling through an infinite scrolling screen.

jiofih 6y ago
Not true for you, true in general - “nobody” being just hyperbole.
mgkimsal 6y ago
Just upgraded from SE to 12 mini, but was hitting issues with testing a web app on my SE. I'd also kept it on ios 12, and all new 'large' devices were auto upgraded to iOS 14... hilarity ensued. We hit weird bugs that only showed up on iOS 14. But... in general, yeah, the size/space/perf issues are more easily spotted on a device like an SE. I re-optimized some JS - reduced memory, speed improvements - was far more noticeable on the SE than the newer flagship devices.

dep_b 6y ago

I used an iPhone SE 2016 until recently and I never really ran into situations where an app was unusable because of this. Also a lot of these design mistakes could be described as “reinventing UINavigationBar or UITabBar, crappy”. One thing that really annoyed me was doing an accidental shake gesture while typing something. The blocking Undo dialog’s buttons are covered by the keyboard and you cannot do anything but restart the app.

tinus_hn 6y ago

A big part of the problem is people just not following the guidelines. If you have a toolbar with buttons that have labels, it’s not going to fit. But if you’re following the guidelines, you don’t have labels and it fits. If you have a list with a refresh button on the bottom you have to scroll to see that button on a small screen. But if you use the standard pull to refresh control, you don’t even need the button. If you use these smart hamburger menu overlay or scroll controls, they look bad on untested devices. Don’t use hamburger menus. Most of the screenshots in this article are from iOS apps that show Google Material Design. It’s not too surprising this doesn’t work properly on Apple devices, the design doesn’t fit and you can’t implement it using the toolkit Apple designed, built and tested to work on all their devices. Edit: By the way you don’t even need to get a tiny phone to test this because most of the problems also show up when you increase the operating system font size which you’re also supposed to test.

tyfon 6y ago
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 if everyone followed the guidelines, used the standard UI elements and images etc it would be much better. I could even forgo button labels if that happens :)
- chrismorgan 6y ago
  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.
  - tyfon 6y ago
    Yeah I used to be on android, I had less issues there. This is my first iPhone (version 11) and I'm not sure if I will keep with apple. The tracking of google is bothering me big time though so I might just accept a worse user experience to avoid that.

tannhaeuser 6y ago

Unfortunately, that includes Apple's own apps on 6s/7/8 iPhones. For example, the new [double-swipes right] "app library" or "app mediathek" or what it's called in your language overflows into the bottom. Or in iMessage, the context menu on a photo.

jdmoreira 6y ago

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 have handle smaller screens explicitly. As iOS developers stuck into this position we have grown to despise having to deal with smaller screens. It just feels like we can't win.

ryandrake 6y ago
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 larger for accessibility reasons? What if they are on an odd sized phone, or even one we haven't even seen yet?
- daniellarusso 6y ago
  Exactly. It is just mediocre design.

chrismorgan 6y ago

The Google Maps thing isn’t entirely about screen size (though I would hope it wouldn’t be quite so bad on larger screens—but I’m only familiar with how it looks on a small-by-modern-standards Android phone, where it’s about the same as on the iPhone depicted in this article, or even a little less); it’s about the product’s overarching philosophy, which has changed over the past decade (in a direction I strongly dislike). It used to be about, y’know, maps, but maps are now incidental, a means to a different end, ably demonstrated by their icon change a year ago from a map to a location pin. It’s all about the destinations now, and mapping has progressively deteriorated and been deemphasised. At least in the case depicted, you should be able to get it to show just the map by tapping once in the map area. (If you’re interested in more about this, https://www.justinobeirne.com https://www.justinobeirne.com has some excellent long-form content analysing all the major maps products, how they’ve changed over time, &c. https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-new-app-icon https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-new-app-icon and https://www.justinobeirne.com/what-happened-to-google-maps https://www.justinobeirne.com/what-happened-to-google-maps are good brief starting points.)

sfvisser 6y ago
Google Maps is not much better on larger screens unfortunately. It’s almost as if it wants to obscure the map area, no matter what you try. When using it you kind of feel how a once pioneering piece of tech and UX initially built by a small team got taken over by corporate Google which knows best what their users need...
- mleonhard 6y ago
  Google makes what will get the team members promoted. That is rarely what the users need.
jiggawatts 6y ago
While we're on the topic: YouTube, which is inherently a video content viewing service, goes out of its way to obscure the video content. The TV app, the mobile app, and the browser app all insist on overlaying the content with random garbage that no sane human being could possibly be more interested in that the content that they launched with the intention of watching! Heaven help you if you open a popular live feed. The wall of random teenage stream-of-thought noise streaming down across the video is just unspeakably crass. Why was this added, you ask? Because some overpaid manager at Google saw that Facebook was doing more video, so turning a video streaming service into a social network seemed like a brilliant idea. I mean why not? Why wouldn't people watching NASA feeds want snotty little kids spaming swearwords on their television? PS: products slowly morphing to become nigh unrecognisable is a pre-Internet issue. The MTV channel used to show just music videos!

polyrand 6y ago

I use an iPhone 8 (more or less the same as the SE 2020) and I don't find this bugs often, but they are definitely there. Regarding web design, I always set the iPhone 5/SE view as the baseline. I think it's a lot easier to go from there to a bigger device than the other way around. Also, the worst that can happen is that there's some empty spaces on the sides or some card gets wide. However, when you start from a big device and then try to fit the UI to smaller ones it's a lot harder. Another problem is the rendering engines. I once had to help a friend with a problem that was only happening in my iPhone, but when I used Chrome (in my laptop) with the mobile view it worked ok. I could then reproduce the bug using Safari (in my laptop) with the mobile view active, so I guess it was because of the small size + rendering engine. Those things are also hard to debug and catch.

chrismorgan 6y ago

On the web, people came up with the concept of “mobile-first”, meaning that you should first of all make sure everything can work with the smallest size, and then add whatever adjustments, improvements, extra functionality due to size, &c. for larger screens after that. (Of course, in practice people made a hash of it (as they always do) and it often became mobile-only design, with users of larger screens getting a comically bad experience that was manifestly designed for tiny screens; but that’s not the idea of mobile-first.) I’d say it’s generally a sound philosophy, even though at larger sizes you may desire to recompose the UI quite substantially. It’s generally easier and/or safer to design for small screens and reformat or add extras for larger screens, rather than to design for large screens and reformat or remove for smaller screens. But people definitely regularly don’t go small enough in their idea of “mobile”. I decided some years ago that I would target 300px as my baseline width, and I feel that’s served me well. (And if convenient, I make it work past 260px.) 300px is a bit smaller than anything mainstream, and is thus pretty safe. (I haven’t often done much that needs a baseline height, but I’d use 300px and/or 450px there, considering both portrait and landscape usage as necessary or applicable.)

frosted-flakes 6y ago
Something that I do that most people seem to miss is disable sticky headers below a certain height. It's super easy to do with a simple media query. I used to use a square-screened BlackBerry 10 device, and the number of websites that didn't do this was infuriating, and I made frequent use of a "Kill Sticky" bookmarklet. But everyone runs into this issue at some point just by turning their phone to landscape mode, which most web developers evidently don't test with.
- germ 6y ago
  I came here to bring this up, I use a Key2 daily and have used a UniHertz Titan for a time. Many applications don't handle odd screen aspects very gracefully. (Like Instagram opting for zooming stories instead of lettering). But sticky headers are the bane of my existence.

some1else 6y ago

Switching the language to German also has interesting effects.

williesleg 6y ago

Fuck you, I do, I have tiny hands. This post is sizeist, you are hate speech against tiny hands

Black101 6y ago

I was using my computer on a ~50in TV and sites were showing me their mobile version... there's a lot broken (it was not that low of a resolution). Maybe the real question should be, why is software broken so badly?

jbverschoor 6y ago

Apple isn't checking apps anymore. They used to be pretty anal about many things. Unfortunately, even their own apps aren't checked completely anymore

tonetheman 6y ago

To take the opposite tack. If it is really only 1% of the people with iphones that you are messing up... that is a gamble I would take. This app will look good for 99% of the wallets who own this phone, the other 1% of the wallets have the cheap phone. By having the smaller device it implies (no matter if this is true or not) your spend will/could be less. To me IOS is such a closed inbred ecosystem apps SHOULD look good on all of the devices.

jbverschoor 6y ago

It's not just small screens. If you enable "Zoom", the aspect ratio changes, and most apps don't handle that properly. Same with following the global text-size settings

mabedan 6y ago

Try using apps with iPhone SE in German language. It’s rare occasion to be able to see a label fully displayed in the ui

tambourine_man 6y ago

> Well, if you’ve been rocking the iPhone SE 2020 you would know If you’ve been rocking the original SE you’d know even better. Such a shame, it’s the best size phone I’ve had.

TrueGeek 6y ago
Have you tried the new Mini? I switched from the Pro and love it.
- layer8 6y ago
  I have, and it is noticeably heavier and less “thumbable” than the SE1 (and the screen scratches much more easily). The mini size is better than the 6/SE2, plus the return to flat edges, but it’s still a compromise in usability compared to the 5/SE1.
  - mgkimsal 6y ago
    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..
    - layer8 6y ago
      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.
      - mgkimsal 6y ago
        I'd meant I considered an SE2, but didn't get it, because of the physical size.

izerik 6y ago

A lot of these aren't "small screen" problems, just bad/hacky coding, not doing things like apple recommends or not handling some edge cases, so they're simply just bugs. Clubhouse - maybe it's an issue that the UI on the right isn't disappearing completely, but maybe that's by design. Anyway, nothing is clipped/truncated Spotify - the "now plating" bar's height isn't added to the scrollview's content inset. Not a small screen issue since it's on the vertical axis and content is scrollable. Globe Telecom - yes, this could count as one (with the tabbar). CloudMd - that's just probably hardcoding the status bar's height, nothing is truncated/out of view. Foodpanda - that side menu is actually scrollable. y letter is cut off, ok. Nothing you can't access. Google Maps - this is a design decision, same ratio of map/list height on my iPhone XS. You can either view the map or the list in full screen Headspace - navigation/status bar issue, just bad coding local bank - yes, this counts as well Lalamove - yes, 2 textfields are too much Shortcuts - scroll up? I do agree that small screen devices aren't getting enough focus on this regard. edit: formatting

jariel 6y ago

The author made the wrong conclusion. Most of these are either by design or just UI bugs or poor design.

nottorp 6y ago

... and i don't view the second iphone se as small even. I have people in my family rocking the original iphone se because THAT is small enough for them.

mucholove 6y ago

My font size is set to a fairly large size. For many apps, I have no idea what to click on because no one follows the autolayout. Some (see Evernote) are so bad that I can’t even click the sign in button because the touch target seems to be on the text and the button only shows 2 letters. ¿Should I be outraged? So it goes...

prox 6y ago
A peeve of mine is the constant need to throw popups when you’ve just installed an app. “Want notifications? Please like us! Follow us on X” and the list goes on... Whatever happened to “don’t stop the proceedings” for user friendliness? If your app behaves like it has attachment issues, I don’t want it.
alisonkisk 6y ago
iPhone and Android. So many apps have text they don't fit within their colored backgrounds, and overflow or get cut off.
ectopod 6y ago
This isn't new. Back in 1992 you had two choices for DPI in Windows 3.1 but many applications couldn't cope with the larger setting. I used it anyway because 1024x768 on a 14" CRT was unreadable with regular fonts.

StrangeOrange 6y ago

That Clubhouse UI is the way it is generally. It is that way on my iPhone 8+ anyway. Best to check your hypotheses before writing them down as facts.

Xenoamorphous 6y ago

It’s particularly painful in the EU and with a 2016 iPhone SE like me. I’ve come across too many GDPR dialogs where it’s impossible to click any of the buttons.

PaulHoule 6y ago

The more I study UI systems the more I like Win95.

dbg31415 6y ago

Seeing a lot of issues here that would also be violations of WCAG guidelines, and thus be something you could bring an ADA accessibility suit against the companies over. https://medium.com/front-end-weekly/dominos-pizza-and-web-accessibility-laws-b76dc94f34f9 https://medium.com/front-end-weekly/dominos-pizza-and-web-ac... https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/07/dominos-supreme-court.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/07/dominos-supreme-court.html For all of your web projects... 90+ score in Lighthouse is a good bar to aim for. And look for any errors in Wave or Axe -- these should be part of your requirements (starting with requirements to the design team around contrast and colors they can use, as well as requirements to the devs), and part of your QA process. Call out issues you see. Compliance with WCAG (2.1, AA for most businesses https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21 https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21) is the de facto law of the land. https://wave.webaim.org/ https://wave.webaim.org/ https://www.deque.com/axe/ https://www.deque.com/axe/

kps 6y ago
I'm no fan of ADA ambulance chasers, but if they start going after mobile and web ‘designers’ my schadenfreude will be unermesslich.
- dbg31415 5y ago
  > my schadenfreude will be unermesslich My new favorite set of words.

dade_ 6y ago

For me it was Google Maps on my iPhone SE, but that was several years ago. The great GUI design for the display size is what made the classic iPhone size work. Essentially Apple decided to allow apps to be published that were terrible on smaller devices and I realized those horses weren't going to get back into the barn. So I switched to a Samsung Flip, and I've learned that a device that has a large display and fits in my pocket is a reasonable compromise. Now they just need to be a reasonable price.

Davidbrcz 6y ago

Now you can imagine my pain as someone who is visually impaired and who had to increase all the sizes to the max to be able to read anything....

evolveyourmind 6y ago

The real problem is that designers usually focus on a single device without considering any other screen size

BelleOfTheBall 6y ago
This is in part because it's assumed that everyone will get the cool new model once it's out and, in particular with iPhones, there's a marketing push to acquire newer models, lest yours feels outdated or stops being supported by the company.

ArkanExplorer 6y ago

iPhone 7, iPhone 8, iPhone SE 2020 all share the same screen size and resolution - so isn't this a problem on those other devices as well? And for that matter so do iPhone 6 and 6S, which are still current as of iOS 14. iPhone 7 and up are still going to support iOS 15, so these devices will be with us for a while.

furr 6y ago

No one designs for IE6 anymore either. If it costs a lot more to support a platform that doesn't bring in money, it would be a terrible business decision. "This is losing is a LOT of money, but it would be a nice thing to do" is not realistic.

hawos 6y ago
The iPhone SE 2020 is hardly comparable to IE6.
- Nailgun 6y ago
  With all of the annoyances that Safari ios provides, I genuinely consider it the spiritual successor to IE.

sebastien_b 6y ago

My favorite so far is my banking app asking a security question, with it being in a single-line field that truncates right at where it asks what information to provide. In fact, I think I'll upload it somewhere for this author to add to the list.

geniium 6y ago

Some are clearly mistakes from the builders, others are features. Come on stop bitching around and pick up some real apps.

bondolo 6y ago

The same problem exists on Android. I chose one size larger system font because I like to be able to read the screen with my glasses off and safely read the screen while I am driving. The result is UI regularly covered by the keyboard. Text clipping and text overflows. The tiny map problem mentioned in the article. As much as I want a smaller phone I fear that it would be unusable with the default UI and certainly if I chose to use increased text size.

fortran77 6y ago

I can understand Clubhouse. They don't care about people with old small phones--they're not influencers. But banks, drug stores, and things like Spotify should be paying attention to these things. Many businesses may out-source app development to people who just don't care about anything but "meeting the spec" but Spotify should know better.

brianzelip 6y ago

I start design at iPhone 5 (320px wide in portrait orientation). However, it will often work down to 300px or less.

gcb0 6y ago

"oh buy i gladly pay the apple tax and subject myself to a single apple store with draconian rules for quality products in the entire ecosystem"

crazygringo 6y ago

This feels... silly. Many of the examples have nothing to do with screen size (e.g. cutting off the bottom of letters or "so much white space"), or are intended ("Dang I can barely see the map" -- well yeah that's because the primary data is the list of results). Many other comments here are listing that many of the supposed issues are the same on large screens too. I used the original SE and then upgraded to the SE2 and none of this has been any kind of problem. In fact, almost all of these are great examples of responsive design. Even if you have to scroll a little or some ellipses are shown... they seem to all work. If this is the worst the author can find of small screens not working... then they seem to have proved the opposite point, that small screens are actually working great.

ruph123 6y ago

One thing that really annoyed me who always preferred the smaller iPhones like the SE: When Apple updated their Music app to make everything super big and bloated it basically got unusable. Especially for classical music where you could not see past the long name of the symphony to see which movement it was. And even while playing you had to wait for the running text to reach the important part. And all this was just blown up, they did not have to cram in a lot of infos they just increased the size of every UI element, made fonts bigger and bolt. It was really poor design, it felt like a phone for the elderly. Also one feature was gone that the old Music app had which would've helped here: hold down on a song to get the overlay of the whole name... In general classical music is really poorly supported by many music services and apps but this was such a huge annoyance that I had to switch to a third party app and delete that shitty Music app.

bouke 6y ago
Yeah that’s what bothering me as well. Seems to be happening everywhere though, reduced information density and increased whitespace and fonts. So as we’re all buying something with bigger screens, we still keep loosing real estate.

brundolf 6y ago

Wait this is the 2020 SE? I.e. an iPhone 8, not even the older one? I'm even more surprised because the Mini exists now as a first-class citizen. Apple has historically been good about making sure all approved apps provide a good experience on all the devices that they should; I wonder why they've dropped the ball on this one

rojcyk 6y ago

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://www.figma.com/community/plugin/732240841094697441/Viewports https://www.figma.com/community/plugin/732240841094697441/Vi... But developers do the very same thing and as often as designers. Just further down the pipeline. 2. Not supporting the smallest possible devices like the original SE is a reasonable business decision. It is not even making it into the charts at all the products I'm currently working on. It is simply not worth the effort (since the effort is not as insignificant as people here say). 3. Supporting the smallest devices is definitely not free. And it has a real monetary, technological and UX cost. It costs a lot of money to properly test, report, design, and implement every possible edge case for every possible viewports. Developers HATE creating special layouts or cases for specific devices (speaking about native mobile development) and if I recall correctly, Apple might even prohibit it. And lastly, design is about making the best possible solution, for the biggest amount of people. Quite often you will find yourself in a situation where you have to decide whether you will vastly improve the experience for the 99% of people and make the experience not ideal for the 1% or vice versa. Which is the better call? 4. Blaming it all on designers is just too harsh. Yes, not everyone is perfect, and designers often miss it, but more often than not it is a simple business decisions. Designers can decide to ditch a certain viewport because it can benefit the majority, the same way developers decide to drop certain OS support.

brundolf 6y ago
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 <1% of iPhone users, especially considering how long iPhones last. My parents are still doing fine with their 6Ses. Edit: I was wrong about the mini being smaller; it's somewhat larger than the 8/SE

Adrig 6y ago

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.

pmlnr 6y ago
> Negative space is good Yeah, no. There's spacing, and there's useless void - negative space is usually being the latter. Websites becoming ridiculous on computers, because everyone keeps designing for fat greasy fingers, and this trend is absolutely horrible.
- Adrig 6y ago
  You know that a proper website is designed differently at different breakpoints right? What you see on a computer screen is not designed based on fingers taps. Of course there are cases where it's taken too far. Not arguing that there isn't bad design out there. But again, negative space is good. It's proven better for comprehension and accessibility
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- Daho0n 6y ago
  You just proved his point though.

mro_name 6y ago

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

DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
> 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.
- mro_name 6y ago
  I'm a big fan of static builds. But cannot understand how a 15MB test IPA becomes a 70MB production IPA and takes 300MB to upload. That's IMO software explosion and bloat as Niklaus Wirth ranted on decades ago.

HumblyTossed 6y ago

How do these apps get by Apple's highly regarded, industry leading, 30% worthy, approval process?

bambataa 6y ago

I get frustrated on my iPhone SE by apps that have me fill in a field but then no “done” button to close the keyboard. Between the keyboard and the app’s overly large heading, there’s barely any space to click anything else to close the keyboard without triggering something else. Cronometer is bad for this.

aaronbrethorst 6y ago

I do all of my iOS development on an iPhone SE simulator. No, not the iPhone SE 2020, the original one. Scaling designs up to an X class device is much easier than trying to scale down.

mouzogu 6y ago

There's too many devices and screens/orientations to handle. It's a hassle. Mobile-first was an approach to fix this but pragmatism usually dictates otherwise.

jonas21 6y ago

In the first example (Clubhouse), it's a deliberate design decision to show the edge of the cards on the left as an affordance that you can swipe to get back to the main content. The Google Maps example is probably because most people want to see the list of results when you search for a category of businesses - the map is secondary. If you do want to see more map, you can just pull down on that handle at the top of the list or press the "View Larger Map" button. Many of the other examples seem somewhat nitpicky, so I don't really think this supports the argument that nobody is designing for small devices.

riantogo 6y ago

I'm humbled by the effort required to create good UI that works well everywhere. That is why I decided to use stock bootstrap with minimal changes. The designer tried to customize it (causing flaws on certain screen sizes). I had them roll it all back to strict use of bootstrap classes. I'm okay with the limitations imposed. Atleast it is functional everywhere.

sharkjacobs 6y ago

Gosh, if only there was some kind of curated App Store run by Apple which only sold apps which had been reviewed and vetted by human beings who could check for this kind of thing.

Daho0n 6y ago
Since many comments here says how Apple's own apps have the same problems, that wouldn't do any difference even if the app store was actually curated for quality and not control.

vertis 6y ago

I find it strange that these big companies aren't testing across a broad range of devices. I'm a solo freelancer, but the last app I built for a client, I actually went out and bought an iPhone SE, because that was the minimum spec. Granted I don't load it onto that phone often, but I checked that it worked as expected, and the layout behaved reasonably. An iPhone SE (not 2020) will set you back less than $100. Anything that teenagers use (e.g. Spotify) you have to assume it'll be run across all kinds of budget devices.

FractalHQ 6y ago

I blame the CSS spec for not giving us responsive text sizes. It’s 2021, the Internet was literally built on text, and we still can’t have text that automatically grows and shrinks based on the size of its parent. We can go to Mars, but we can’t have responsive text. Blows my mind.

cdeutsch 5y ago

1Password on my original iPhone SE is a train wreck. It often doesn't show the button to enable biometric unlock, so I'm constantly having to type the full password