The Iphone 5

The release of a new device has a completely different meaning for the development community. And in the case of the just released iPhone 5, it was to the sound of groaning.

As I stated in an earlier post, we prefer to develop for the iOS platform because of its unified aspect ratio, 3:2 or 960x640.All iOS devices carry this. That is not the case with Android devices where the aspect ratio is all over the place, making it difficult to build on the platform because of the extensive testing needed to ensure that all assets are displaying correctly, and are not stretched.

The reason behind the collective groan was because Apple decided to change their aspect ratio, it’s now a 1.775:1, or 1136x640. Which is just kind of bizarre. The reasoning behind the change is to give a wide format look to the device.

But to developers, it means that all games created for the iPhone 4 and lower will not fill the entirety of the screen.  Thankfully the content is not stretched to fill up the space, it is simply letter boxed.

The biggest problem that this creates is that two versions will be needed to be created by the developers if they wish to cater to the iPhone 5 users as well as the majority who still use iPhone 3’s and 4’s.  This is going to pose difficulty to studios, like us, who don’t own an iPhone 5. We will not be able to test any of the aspect ratio changes we build…