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Not disagreeing with you, but as a developer, I'm happy that we can now do UX design for 4.7-inch phones, and prevent installation of our app on smaller phones.

Not disagreeing with you, but as a developer, I'm happy that we can now do UX design for 4.7-inch phones, and prevent installation of our app on smaller phones. You do that in an indirect manner, by requiring NFC, thus eliminating 4-inch phones, which don't have NFC: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/DeviceInformation/Reference/iOSDeviceCompatibility/DeviceCompatibilityMatrix/DeviceCompatibilityMatrix.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40013599-CH17-SW1 https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/De... (Cmd-F nfc). If Apple had updated the iPhone SE with NFC, this trick wouldn't work any more, and I'd be forced to do UX design for 4-inch phones. Till I find product-market fit, I don't want to be distracted by overhead like this.

linkregister 8y ago
That sounds directly user-hostile. Imagine if HN's web server served 401s to everyone with a Mozilla user agent.
- calcifer 8y ago
  Literally everyone already has a Mozilla user agent.
- kartickv 8y ago
  I see where you're coming from, but you're missing the point that startups are all about finding product-market fit with the least money, time and people. Guess what's worse than an app that doesn't support your particular model of iPhone? An app that supports all possible devices and configurations, but that doesn't solve a problem users care about. Then all the time and resources that went into it go down the drain.
yurishimo 8y ago
Just curious, since I'm not a mobile developer, is most app design done with pixel perfect layouts now? I vaguely remember watching a YouTube tutorial years and years ago (iPhone 4 I think) about making apps and many of the interface elements would expand/contract to the devices screen. Not bashing on your decision, just generally curious. If so, that sounds like a lot of work to make custom interface layouts for a half dozen devices.
- kartickv 8y ago
  Entirely reasonable question, but I wasn't talking about making custom layouts for each device. I'm also talking about a single UI design that is responsive to different screen sizes. But instead of supporting all iPhones, if we instead support 4.7-inch screens and above, that's less work, because there are fewer cases to handle. Taking your example of expand/collapse, when you implement it, it's more complex than it appears when watching a Youtube video: you now have to handle three states: a collapsed state on small screens, an expanded state on small screens, and big screens, which don't have expand/collapse. This imposes more work on the designer to design for these states and make sure they're all usable and look good, perhaps with animated transitions between them. On the engineers, who have to deal with multiple code paths and edge cases. On QA, to spend more time trying to test more scenarios on different devices. Everything sounds simple till you code it up :) Now, if you could eliminate this complexity by not having to collapse the control in the first place, that would be simpler. Maybe there's enough space on the 4.7-inch screen for that. UIs scale up better than down. I prefer to do UI design for the smallest supported screen size. If we choose to support 4-inch screens, we may have to choose a UI design that's not optimal for 4.7-inch and bigger screens, which the majority of our users actually use. Whereas if 4.7 was the baseline, we may be able to come up with a better design for most of our users. All these problems are, of course, solvable, but if they take X amount of time to solve, is there something more beneficial you can do in that time?

linkregister 8y ago

That sounds directly user-hostile. Imagine if HN's web server served 401s to everyone with a Mozilla user agent.

calcifer 8y ago
Literally everyone already has a Mozilla user agent.
kartickv 8y ago
I see where you're coming from, but you're missing the point that startups are all about finding product-market fit with the least money, time and people. Guess what's worse than an app that doesn't support your particular model of iPhone? An app that supports all possible devices and configurations, but that doesn't solve a problem users care about. Then all the time and resources that went into it go down the drain.

yurishimo 8y ago

Just curious, since I'm not a mobile developer, is most app design done with pixel perfect layouts now? I vaguely remember watching a YouTube tutorial years and years ago (iPhone 4 I think) about making apps and many of the interface elements would expand/contract to the devices screen. Not bashing on your decision, just generally curious. If so, that sounds like a lot of work to make custom interface layouts for a half dozen devices.

kartickv 8y ago
Entirely reasonable question, but I wasn't talking about making custom layouts for each device. I'm also talking about a single UI design that is responsive to different screen sizes. But instead of supporting all iPhones, if we instead support 4.7-inch screens and above, that's less work, because there are fewer cases to handle. Taking your example of expand/collapse, when you implement it, it's more complex than it appears when watching a Youtube video: you now have to handle three states: a collapsed state on small screens, an expanded state on small screens, and big screens, which don't have expand/collapse. This imposes more work on the designer to design for these states and make sure they're all usable and look good, perhaps with animated transitions between them. On the engineers, who have to deal with multiple code paths and edge cases. On QA, to spend more time trying to test more scenarios on different devices. Everything sounds simple till you code it up :) Now, if you could eliminate this complexity by not having to collapse the control in the first place, that would be simpler. Maybe there's enough space on the 4.7-inch screen for that. UIs scale up better than down. I prefer to do UI design for the smallest supported screen size. If we choose to support 4-inch screens, we may have to choose a UI design that's not optimal for 4.7-inch and bigger screens, which the majority of our users actually use. Whereas if 4.7 was the baseline, we may be able to come up with a better design for most of our users. All these problems are, of course, solvable, but if they take X amount of time to solve, is there something more beneficial you can do in that time?