[skohan]

> Most of the time it's not much extra effort to make it work properly

I strongly disagree - with smaller devices you might be talking about an entirely different layout, and maybe a separate set of assets. More time for designers, more time for developers, and a whole category of tests for QA to verify during regression tests. You're talking about widening the entire development pipeline.

[enlyth]

Most people on HN think UIs should be autogenerated from backend code and that peak UI was Windows 95. Anyone worth their salt doing some real UI work knows how difficult it is to accommodate every arbitrary resolution and aspect ratio.

[iamben]

To reply to you both - I'm specifically talking about the web. I have no experience building apps, so can't comment there. But for the web, I'm absolutely happy to argue it's not that much more effort.

[ryandrake]

Whether it's the web or an "app," it should work sensibly at any reasonable resolution. It doesn't have to look good, or look like the pixel-perfect, happy-path Photoshop mocks the UX designer made, but it should function. Desktop developers have been doing at least an OK job of this for decades.

Yet here we are, where it's a struggle to find an app that even sensibly supports landscape mode, or supports a user-configured font size.

[skohan]

Arguably most of the examples given in the post "work sensibly". They have some aesthetic issues but they should function

[greggturkington]

Developers that think we should support the iPhone 3 just to be nice have not worked on enterprise-level apps. They underestimate the cost of the things you describe--design, QA, support, etc. It's more than a media query.