14 DAY TRIAL // The iPhone X should start shipping in just a couple of days to customers who stayed up late the last Friday to be among the first pre-ordering the device.
And while the reviews that reached the web lately suggested inconsistent performance of the Face ID facial recognition system, Apple itself seems to point to another potential big problem that the iPhone X might be hitting: apps that aren’t optimized for its display.
The iPhone X is the first model to go for an OLED screen with a size that hasn’t been used before on an iOS device and with a notch that has until now proved to be a love-it-or-hate-it kind of feature. It’s this mix of a new size and the notch that makes apps look awful on the iPhone X, and unless developers ship updates as fast as possible, the experience at first could be substantially impacted.
Apple itself doesn’t seem to be in a rush to do it and a screenshot captured from a video review of the iPhone X confirms that not even the Apple Store app is rendered correctly on the device. The company hasn’t shipped an update for its apps to look flawlessly on the new screen, with the UI getting the annoying black bars to compensate for the new aspect ratio.
App updates coming too late?
In most of the cases, Apple ships updates for its apps on day 1, so the Store app could finally be optimized for the iPhone X on Friday, but the company should have done this before sending review units to tech sites across the world. The experience should be flawless from the very beginning and not signal one of the biggest drawbacks of the device.
Because that’s exactly what it is, a headache that Apple needs to deal with as fast as possible and which it has to tackle with help from developers.
However, this isn’t the first time when iOS apps need to be updated to look right on an iPhone, and the same thing happened when Apple introduced the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. It took some time for everyone to update their apps, and it’s likely the same thing will happen this time as well.
For what it’s worth, some devs have already updated apps in anticipation of the iPhone X, including Google, whose YouTube app is already rendered perfectly fine on the new model.