14 DAY TRIAL // The iPhone X will finally go up on pre-order in approximately one week, but even though everyone seems to be looking forward to this eagerly-anticipated moment, there still are several questions to be answered regarding certain features of the device.
One of them concerns the way the notch (the sensor bar at the top of the screen) impacts app UI, and a video that leaked to the web a couple of hours ago seems to suggest that the iPhone X will most likely a critical app problem, at least in the first months.
Let’s start with the good things. Posted on reddit, this video reveals a white iPhone X that looks pretty good, though this isn’t such a big surprise following Apple’s September 12 unveiling and the tons of photos that were posted online lately. But as some people say, the iPhone X appears to be even more handsome in real life than it was in Apple’s presentation, so buyers might be in for a pleasant surprise.
On the other hand, there’s the bad side of the story. The video shows Instagram running on the iPhone X, and unfortunately, this seems to confirm one of the big concerns that many developers expressed after the September unveiling: the notch at the top has a dramatic impact on the UI of apps, especially without layout updates that are specifically introduced for the X.
Wanted: App updates for the iPhone X
The app heading is clearly unaligned to the top of the screen due to the introduction of the notch, which means that developers need to ship updates to make sure their apps render the UI correctly on the new iPhone.
If this problem exists on an app designed by a company the size of Instagram, imagine how long it’d take for smaller developers to update their apps, and this can only be bad news for Apple and its users.
As a result, the iPhone X is likely to experience an app problem in the first months after launch, and it all depends on Apple and its developers to deal with it as fast as possible.
This wouldn’t be the first time when Apple’s iPhones are experiencing an app crisis. Both the iPhone 6 and the iPhone 6 Plus encountered the same UI issues because of the new screen sizes, as all apps were optimized for smaller screens, so if Apple learned something from this past blunder, it’s probably already working with developers to ship updates for their apps on day 1 of iPhone X availability.
