[themartorana]

There are plenty of apps that are guilty of this as well. Instagram comes immediately to mind. Not allowing pinch zoom on pictures I'm viewing on a tiny pocket screen (when there's no good technological reason for it) is a shame.

I've turned on assistive zooming on my iPhone to overcome the limitation.

[grmarcil]

Not being able to zoom on Instagram is maybe the #1 most baffling UX decision I've ever encountered. You're a photosharing app but all I can see is a 2" square thumbnail image???

[achairapart]

> There are plenty of apps that are guilty of this as well. Instagram comes immediately to mind.

For native apps it's a design choice. For whatever reason (good or bad) they don't want you to zoom in.

For websites instead, pinch to zoom exists for a design deficency, mostly for web pages not optimized for small sized screen. Responsive web design is helping but the gap is not filled yet. Hopefully it's just a matter of time and we'll experience beautiful mobile websites.

For all other needs, there is OS assistive zoom.

[somebehemoth]

While I agree with what you are saying I have a minor nit: "For websites instead, pinch to zoom exists for a design deficency, mostly for web pages not optimized for small sized screen."

I understand what you mean, but in the context of sites specifically disabling zoom it seems to me that pinch to zoom is a design feature and not a deficiency of traditional web pages. Responsive helps, but there are definitely times when I wish the developers would provide only a desktop view so I can use my browser features to optimize my own user experience. (I am not representative of the general public, I know).

[systoll]

Non-zooming sites can (and should) honour your system-wide font-size setting, giving you the ability to use the system's settings to achieve uniformly comfortable reading experiences across websites and apps.

Zooming doesn't do much to give users much control over the reading experience -- iOS does not let users set or change the viewport size, so everyone gets the same columns to zoom into/out of.

If you want text bigger than the single size the designer decided on, you're forced to scroll along each line of text -- which is a terrible experience.

If you wanted it smaller, zooming out won't 'reflow' the layout, so you'll just be losing screen real estate to peripheral content.

[somebehemoth]

I meant to refer to the ability to zoom in on images for the purpose of observing greater detail (which I did not include my comment). I do not disagree with your comment.

[tracker1]

Yeah, facebook (when I last used it) didn't even respect the accessability settings in android (for extra large fonts). It's a problem in a lot of applications.. if your app doesn't allow you to increase the fonts to at least 12pt, you're doing it wrong... there's a reason that was the default print size since forever and a day...

[FanaHOVA]

They probably do it to save bandwidth. Smaller images, smaller size.