[rojcyk]

Wow, lots of assumptions or designer blaming in this thread. Not that it is unexpected, but it still hurts since it is not as black and white as people here draw it to be. Let me give you my perspective as a designer who spent quite a lot of time on this topic.

1. The fact that some designers ignore other devices than their own is definitely true. That is why I created a Figma plugin to broaden the perspective. https://www.figma.com/community/plugin/732240841094697441/Vi... But developers do the very same thing and as often as designers. Just further down the pipeline.

2. Not supporting the smallest possible devices like the original SE is a reasonable business decision. It is not even making it into the charts at all the products I'm currently working on. It is simply not worth the effort (since the effort is not as insignificant as people here say).

3. Supporting the smallest devices is definitely not free. And it has a real monetary, technological and UX cost. It costs a lot of money to properly test, report, design, and implement every possible edge case for every possible viewports. Developers HATE creating special layouts or cases for specific devices (speaking about native mobile development) and if I recall correctly, Apple might even prohibit it. And lastly, design is about making the best possible solution, for the biggest amount of people. Quite often you will find yourself in a situation where you have to decide whether you will vastly improve the experience for the 99% of people and make the experience not ideal for the 1% or vice versa. Which is the better call?

4. Blaming it all on designers is just too harsh. Yes, not everyone is perfect, and designers often miss it, but more often than not it is a simple business decisions. Designers can decide to ditch a certain viewport because it can benefit the majority, the same way developers decide to drop certain OS support.

[brundolf]

Not supporting people jumping to bad conclusions or being toxic, but it's worth pointing out the author said this is the 2020 SE. Which is to say the body of an iPhone 8, not a 5. Which is to say roughly the same size as all iPhones before the X (and larger than the brand-new Mini!). That's not <1% of iPhone users, especially considering how long iPhones last. My parents are still doing fine with their 6Ses.

Edit: I was wrong about the mini being smaller; it's somewhat larger than the 8/SE

[derefr]

> Which is to say roughly the same size as all iPhones before the X (and larger than the brand-new Mini!)

This isn’t about physical size, though; it’s about screen resolution and aspect ratio.

> iPhone 12 mini: 2340×1080 @ 476dpi

> iPhone SE 2020: 1334×750 @ 326dpi

Yes, the 12 mini’s screen is 5.4” while the SE’s screen is 4.7”, but if the SE had the 12 mini’s DPI, it’d have a workable, modern-ish resolution. (Note how the OP never complained about how these apps look on the 12 mini. They look fine on the 12 mini.) The SE 2020 only ended up at the “outdated” resolution of 750p because its pixel density didn’t keep up with the times; not because it’s small per se.

[Kwpolska]

It’s not really useful to talk about DPI/PPI of the screen in an iPhone. The 12 mini uses 3x scaling, the new SE uses 2x. According to [0], the logical resolution is 360 × 780 for the 12 mini and 375 × 667 for the SE. Sometimes, Apple used tricks such as running the OS at 3x and then downscaling it a little [1]. That said, since the SE is meant to be a hardware upgrade with the old size/form factor, some users would not be happy seeing smaller text on the new phone (compared to their old iPhone 6/7/8).

[0] https://iosref.com/res [1] https://www.paintcodeapp.com/news/iphone-6-screens-demystifi...

[brundolf]

My mistake; I made the assumption the Mini would be smaller

Still, the point remains that lots of people are rocking an iPhone older than the XS (the 9 came out at the same time as the X) and would have these same problems

[derefr]

You're correct; I myself still have an iPhone 8. But I tend to think of problems I experience on my iPhone 8 as "being gradually left behind by an ecosystem that has moved on", rather than as "not being supported." (Like how it feels to try to use Windows 8.1 in 2021. It’s not technically End-of-Life’d... but do third-party devs even mention it on download-page compatibility lists any more?)

With an iPhone 8, I know I'm the one "at fault" at this point for sticking with this device, stuck on the wrong side of an inflection point in screen size/resolution from the introduction of "edge" displays all across the ecosystem. I might expect Apple themselves to tune their first-party apps for my device for as long as they claim to support it; but I don’t expect App Store devs to do so. They’re shipping cross-platform designs on a tight schedule, for screens that are almost-exclusively twice as large and high-resolution as mine.

The iPhone SE case is more concerning, because it's still for sale at the Apple Store. This means Apple is claiming it's fit-for-purpose for at least some use-cases. (Maybe that claim doesn't extend to "running apps from the App Store", though.)

I feel like, at this point, the SE is almost the same as the iPod Touch—it's not a thing you get to take advantage of the Apple app ecosystem; it's more a thing you get to either use Apple's first-party apps for basic use-cases, or because it's a very cheap automated development smoke-test deploy target (roughly the iOS equivalent of a Mac Mini.)

[Kwpolska]

The iPhone SE 2020 and the iPhone 8 have the exact same screens. So it’s not your fault, it’s the lazy developers’ who can’t be bothered to sit down with the Simulator, click through the app, and fix at least the most basic glitches.

> The iPhone SE case is more concerning, because it's still for sale at the Apple Store. This means Apple is claiming it's fit-for-purpose for at least some use-cases. (Maybe that claim doesn't extend to "running apps from the App Store", though.)

Nah, Apple’s marketing copy [0] says:

> We put the brains of iPhone 11 Pro in the body of iPhone SE. Our A13 Bionic chip is built for speed. So everything feels fluid, whether you’re launching apps, playing the latest games, or exploring new ways to work and play with augmented reality.

(Also, a smartphone without third-party apps is quite useless for most users.)

[0]: https://www.apple.com/iphone-se/

[rojcyk]

I know that the author is speaking about SE 2020, but the issues listed in the article (at least some of them) to me seemed like bugs rather then deliberate design decisions.

But I completely agree that the iPhone 6. 7, 8, SE viewport should serve as the baseline for most, since the market share is quite significant (it takes the third spot worldwide).