The iPhone X won’t start landing in the average consumer’s hands until early November, unless the rumors of a delay are true, but every so often, a new photo of one out in the wild emerges online. A new iPhone X photo is causing a bit of a stir on Reddit because it identifies a problem that might really irk some people right out of the gate.
The iPhone X photo shows someone playing Pokemon Go, and at first, the problem isn’t immediately clear. You may be in awe at first, simply because of all the hype, but when you look more closely, you realize that the game doesn’t take up the entire screen. There are black bars at the bottom and top of the app.
It looks sort of like the TV screen looks when you’re watching a YouTube video by a gamer who’s using a phone or tablet to play a game like Super Mario Run. The shapes of the screens don’t match because one is horizontal, while the other is vertical, but you understand why it’s like that. Unfortunately, some users might not understand why the iPhone X photo shows that the top and bottom of the screen aren’t used in the app. In fact, it makes the much larger screen-to-body ratio seem pointless because all that extra real estate isn’t being used.
However, several Redditors who saw the posted iPhone X photo explained what’s going on. The problem is that apps are currently optimized for smaller screen-to-body and aspect ratios because that’s what we’ve had for such a long time. The bigger ratio means that the iPhone X’s screen is bigger diagonally but much narrower than the other iPhone models. The result is a lot of “extra” screen space that’s not going to be utilized with most apps, or at least not at first. The apps will look much smaller because they won’t take up the whole screen.
The only good news here is that this will likely be a temporary problem. Developers will have to take time to optimize their apps for the different screen-to-body and aspect ratios, but since Apple is seen as a goldmine because studies have shown that iOS users spend more than Android users on average, it probably won’t take long for them to get with the program.
In fact, many may already be working on this issue, making the later launch a bit of a silver lining because it gives them more time to work on something that’s not an issue with the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus. It’s unclear how many developers will have re-optimized their apps for the different aspect ratio, but any that want to attract profits from the highly-affluent iPhone X buyers will be quick about it.
