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by achairapart 3907 days ago
> 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.
1 comments
somebehemoth 3907 days ago
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).

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systoll 3907 days ago
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.

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somebehemoth 3907 days ago
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.
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