"I don't think the experience of a 5 inch phone is better than a 4 inch phone. But it is a bigger number and thus easy to market."
It's all good that your personal preference is for smaller sized phones. But it's really false to say that bigger screens are just about marketing. Having gone up from a 3.7 to a 4 inch to 4.7 inch device, each of them has been a progressively better experience because of screen real estate. My next phone might be 6 inches, so far bigger is better to me.
If Apple really does pick their phone size based on user experience alone, I think they're doing it wrong. However, I think they got stuck on dimensions set in 2007 and an operating system that isn't flexible enough. (FYI all my devices except my phone are made by Apple.)
> However, I think they got stuck on dimensions set in 2007 and an operating system that isn't flexible enough. (FYI all my devices except my phone are made by Apple.)
Not really the operating system, so much as the APIs provided to developers, which previously required complex layouts to be hand-coded.
However, constraint-based layout was introduced 3 years ago and is being aggressively marketed as 'the future', although it has required some learning time for developers (and wastage of old devices) to become mainstream.
It is likely that the reason for introducing this several years ago was to ease the future introduction of varying screen sizes. I'd view the delay as a consequence of thinking about the problem in its entirety instead of rushing to play the numbers game.
Is it? When Apple introduced other screen sizes in the form of tablets, they required completely new layouts. Will they do that again for larger phones?
The 3.5/4 inch size is very much ingrained in the design of iPhone apps. For example: many apps require reaching into the top left corner for navigation - this has been a HIG recommendation since 2007. Reaching to the top left of a device hard to do on 4+ inch devices. Android and Windows Phone have mostly avoided this, meaning you can operate your phone without reaching into the top left corner. This considerably increases the things you can do on large Android/Windows phones with one hand.
The dev tools have included variable sizing help for several years now. Anything being made now should be using these features to deal with different sized phones, even if just the 4 size and 5 size. Certainly it will make some people's lives difficult it they increase the width of the next phone, but developing new apps now it is easy to handle.
The bigger problem is all of the legacy apps that were designed with pixel perfect backgrounds that weren't meant to be stretched to fill different sized phones. Those have to be redesigned (and probably should have already been for iOS 7) to work for bigger phones.
This. Now that there has been time for apps to be updated for iOS7 and the iPhone 5 size, the transition to variable sizes will be a much lower impact.
Also, it is clear that different sizes of phone will still use the 'iPhone' UI idiom, rather than the 'iPad' idiom.
Basically if you are paying attention to Cocoa, you'll know that they're ready.
(Speaking as someone who has a pixel perfect app in the store, popular for it's design, that is very painful to make flexible)
yeah i've got a few apps like that as well. I've updated some, and kept some that are more popular. Not sure what I'll do with a bigger phone. we'll see how they look I guess. Not sure if the work is better spent updating old apps or making new ones.
It's all good that your personal preference is for smaller sized phones. But it's really false to say that bigger screens are just about marketing. Having gone up from a 3.7 to a 4 inch to 4.7 inch device, each of them has been a progressively better experience because of screen real estate. My next phone might be 6 inches, so far bigger is better to me.
If Apple really does pick their phone size based on user experience alone, I think they're doing it wrong. However, I think they got stuck on dimensions set in 2007 and an operating system that isn't flexible enough. (FYI all my devices except my phone are made by Apple.)