Nobody designs for small iPhone devices anymore. Why do I say this? Well, if you’ve been rocking the iPhone SE 2020 you would know. What I’m saying is there a lot of UI glitches from apps running on iPhone SE.
That does not look like a pleasant user experience.
…And this should surprise nobody coming from a company that intentionally degrades your phones performance and battery life because they want you to buy a new one. The only thing that matters is how the quarterly balance sheets look. Everybody knows that. User experience? Who cares!
This isn’t Apple’s fault. App makers have full control over the decisions shown in the article.
Yes it is surely inconceivable that a company could (should) do something like remove these apps for failing ui guidelines until they get their act together (or at least blobk them on the phones they do not work on).
Still buy apple, get shit.
Let me see if I track the average tech person’s logic here:
Apple: Removes apps, controls what apps can be on your device. Techie: very bad, how dare they!
App developer: Makes an app that doesn’t scale properly, Apple does not remove or block it.
Techie: Why doesn’t Apple do something?
Me: *does not compute*
darknexux,
I object to your portrayal of said logic being what the average tech person thinks 🙂
As far as what apple should do…
1) The should allow sideloading (but won’t, because they profit from the vendor locked status quo they created).
2) Following the implementation of #1 and strong guaranties that consumers are truly free to use competing stores,.. I think stores should be entitled to implement quality controls and choose which products to sell within their stores.
The real reason that apple blocking apps is so controversial has everything to do with #1 and apple using restrictions to enforce it’s app store monopoly. If it weren’t for apple’s efforts to restrict the free market, consumers could benefit from more choices and specialized stores. For example a store could specialize in software for older phones and do a better job at it than apple can. I suspect multiplatform app stores would be very popular.
I knew something felt off about the iPhone SE 2020 but I never connected the dots until I read this article. I don’t like the newer FaceID iPhones and I won’t go back to Android again so I was pretty much stuck with a used iPhone 8 or a new SE. I’m tempted to switch to a GSM carrier (I’m on Xfinity Mobile in the US) so I can use a PinePhone or something like it, but since I paid up front for the iPhone, my bill is basically $0 right now.
All of these are mildly annoying, but not really app breaking bugs. They are mostly slight layout issues and minor usability annoyances. It’s the same kind of quirks you see on Android devices all of the time. If you look at desktop apps, you see the same thing at unusual resolutions. I’m not saying that this is ok, but when you buy what is (for all intents and purposes when looking at the wider market) a niche device, does it make business sense for a company to go back and update the app for this unusual use case? In a perfect world, every app would be perfectly tuned for every device out there. We don’t come close to living in that perfect world. And as for having Apple block apps that don’t “fix” their UI, is it better to have access to an app that has some UI weirdness and isn’t the most convenient to use but is still usable, or to not have access to that app at all? One app mentioned was for a local bank. If I bank there, even if the UI is awkward, I want the app available to me.
SE phones have been hugely successful for Apple, directly responsible for increasing their market shares. Why you refer to them as “a niche device” is baffling. Their positive impact is clear, perhaps you’d like to explain how you arrived at an opinion contrary to the facts?
I apologize. I was thinking of the “mini” which I’ve seen reports of poor sales. The SE on the other hand seems to be selling reasonably well. Still if you look at the percentage of “small” iPhones sold (based on the chart part-way down the page in this article: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/02/the-iphone-12-mini-hasnt-sold-well-according-to-multiple-estimates/ ), the SE still seems to make up a comparatively small number of sales. That said, I’m not a mobile developer so I don’t know what the real-world usage numbers look like. While I personally prefer small (by today’s standards) phone screen sizes, it certainly doesn’t feel like that’s where the market is going. Niche or not, developers have no obligation to develop specifically for your device. As a counter to that, users have no obligation to use a specific app if it doesn’t meet the user’s standards… At least that would be the case if there was proper competition, which often isn’t the case. Users have the right to call out poor UI design, but developers have the equal right to ignore it, particularly if the request doesn’t make business/financial sense.