According to Gizmodo, this 
is Apple’s next iPhone, importantly, to me, with a screen of 640×960. There has been a lot of kvetching around the Internet about the iPhone’s new case, it’s front facing camera, etc. but I think that people are missing the cooler picture here. Since the iPad’s resolution is 768×1024, and that the original iPhone’s screen is at 320×480, then we can only draw one logical conclusion: Apple hates apps.
Yup – I said it. There is no taking it back. I dare you to disagree. Well, at least some apps. The bad apps. The unloved apps.
One of the iPhone’s, and iPod touch’s early competitive advantages against the Android, Palm, Nokia, and Blackberry was it’s consistent development target. As a developer, a typical app that I built for the iPod touch would work just fine for the all of the iPhone platforms because they had the same input, same screen resolution, etc. If it worked on an iPod touch, then I really didn’t need to test it on, say, an iPhone 3G. Unlike, say, the Blackberry line, with several different resolutions, orientations, and input methodologies, developing for one model meant very little chance of it working on the other models. My early Blackberry development was a bit of nightmare. I screamed at Palm when, after making a game for them targeted at 320×480 on the Palm Pre, when they started shipping the Palm Pixi with resolution of 320×400. What kind of sadist company would do that to their developers? Don’t get my started on what it is like to test for a Nokia app. That fragmentation made it quite difficult to develop for them. The recent spat of resolution changes for the iPhone line, though, changes that Apple advantage (but don’t worry about Apple just yet).
Why would Apple do this? Well, partly, of course, is that they sorted of needed to get higher resolution screens for the iPad. But for the iPhones, those little screens are good enough, and Apple has never been known for introducing technology with out a corresponding and compelling uptick for the user’s experience. I think this is part of their strategy for culling their massive app catalog of the crappy apps. I don’t think you can underestimate how many of the apps in the app store basically don’t make any money. Stories abound about the app producer that spent $30,000 in development but only harvested $1,000 from the app store. There are countless more, and I know from first and second hand experience, of apps that, although costing less to develop, are only earning $100 in revenue over the life of the app. So, arguably, most, but not all, of the apps, just suck. Those developers will simply not re-invest the time and money to port them to the iPad or the higher-resolution iPhones.
This is win-win for Apple and the consumers. Apple still gets to rightly claim an un-godly number of apps in their catalog, but as the newer devices come online, those consumers will only normally see the apps designed for their device. As a new iPad owner, I really felt compelled to remove every iPhone app, except for the one or two that didn’t have an iPad equivalent and were actually important to my daily workflow.
My recent apps that I upgraded for to the iPad, Nightlight and Powernap: Forty winks anywhere meant some significant re-thinking of the app. I couldn’t just rely upon iPhone emulation mode – things didn’t look good without re-designing. Redesigning for a different screen is a big deal. The investment is significant. The looming changes in screen resolutions out of Apple is also having me revamp my whole programming workflow – something difficult for less sophisticate programmers and developers shops to pull off. Developing for the iPhone OS line just became a lot tougher.
What Apple could have done to make me think different? While in emulation mode, when zoomed in at 2x, I would have expected to see the fonts, for example, re-scaled. Imagine when you zoom-in in Safari, the text still looks awesome. Not the case for iPhone apps on the iPad. Graphic images also could also have been resampled/interpolated, like when you plop a DVD into a player attached to your fancy HD TV. Those DVDs, without extra processing, look pretty crummy. That crummy image was, originally, a big marketing angle for Blue-Ray purchases. But with good processing, a DVD actually looks pretty decent on an HD TV. Apple is a smart company – they could have done that, too, if they thought it important enough – they just didn’t.
This is all pretty good stuff. Apple wins. Consumers win. And, I think, independent developers will win because of fewer get-rich-quick developers out there trying to win the app lottery, undermining the economics. I, for one, welcome our new varying resolution Apple overlords.
