6th gen iPhone and screen ratio

So here's something interesting. There are overwhelming rumours pointing to the next iPhone being 'widescreen', as in a much taller device, more akin to a 16:9 aspect ratio like that of a lot of Android phones. Yes there's always rumours with Apple but these are starting to become quite strong and consistent.

http://www.macdaddynews.com/wp-conte...e-5-Render.jpg

http://5.mshcdn.com/wp-content/galle...iPhone%205.jpg

I could go for this, I mean I like the idea of having the same extra vertical screen space Android users get, and to have a full widescreen ratio to work with for my games, but I never cared for how HUGE Android phones are getting, this whole 'taller but not wider' idea works for me.

My question is, what will the exporter do about the varying screen widths if/when this turns out to be true? Do we risk having apps rejected for having 'letterboxing' on older devices, or think of some new way to deal with it?

I would think any old apps made in the past will be fine, anything new submitted to apple after the iphone 5 comes out will most likely have to fill the screen.

Hm saying that, I best prepare my game for such a thing just in case.

I'd imagine it being more like the retina display, where support for it is optional, but it must be downscalable to the old device. My concern is that with the exporter in it's current state, it outputs in one aspect ratio and adds black borders for anything which doesn't match, meaning we could build for the 16:9 screen and it'd add black borders for the older devices, but Apple tend to reject any apps with borders on the iPhone.

I just hate these aspecs variations...

I think we just need the option to select cropping instead of letterboxing.

Maybe.

It will mean a lot of legacy apps will have letterboxing or they will be stretched. Apple are all about appearance so this change doesn't seem like a very 'apple' thing to do to me. It would sacrifice the way a lot of their apps look for a new screen ratio designed to display video- which not a huge amount of people use on their phones anyway.

We'll see. Personally, I think keeping the original aspect ratio but increasing screen size a little would be my preference.

I kept thinking "Apple wouldn't do this, they've got the 3.5" screen size perfect, so you can reach the whole screen with your thumbs" etc. etc. but the rumours are gaining a little credibility lately with how many seem to be consistent with each other.

I'm not really sure how this dilemma is any different from the existing one between ipad and iphone/ipod. It would be even more awesome if we could somehow define multiple aspects in our MMF2 files. Either allow per frame resolutions (so we could have a frame for each aspect ratio) or maybe have some kind of cropping mechanism, where we could define the screen boundaries for each device type, but only have a single frame that is used for the largest resolution and assumes some amount of the outer pixels are cropped out.

It seems kind of pointless to go to 16:9, since (as Steve Jobs once pointed out) that is a movie industry standard and the purpose of the device is NOT to watch movies.

I think it would be nice if the screen was slightly larger. But considering a lot of people develop with a larger size in mind, it shouldn't be too much of a problem.

Apple probably won't make all of the apps look by changing the ratio. I can see them changing the screen size a bit though. Going back to an iPod Touch is very strange after using a Galaxy Nexus and it seems Apple is the different platform than the rest in terms of screen size. Hopefully it will be retina out of the blocks, rather than just bringing along another model later on for retina.

The ipad's ratio is so similar to the iphone's anyway I don't know why they didn't just choose 3:2 for that as well. In fact it makes more sense for the ipad to be 16:9 as it's a much better video watching device than a phone.

But at least with the ipad/iphone difference, it's a different device which you use differently. Having a situation where the iphone userbase is divided between different aspect ratios isn't a great for apple's developers imo. It's one of the reasons I prefer iphone development to android development right now (in terms of design anyway- technical reasons aside), I'm always slightly uneasy that some people are going to be viewing my graphics at stretched resolutions or letterboxing when I've put a lot of time into making them look the way I want them.

Maybe apple's masterplan in the next few years is to have both iphone and ipad be 16:9?