UX Cruft: iPhone Apps Are Still Crummy On iPad

The likely reason why and four ways Apple could improve

TL;DR – Every product has band-aids; don't forget to rip them off

In the decade since Apple released the iPad, there's one particularly disappointing "feature" that's been neglected in update after update. I'm referring, of course, to the unfortunate way that iPads handle iPhone apps.

Let's start from the beginning... Before the Retina Display "made everything blocky" or the iPhone 4's "AntennaGate" prompted Apple to give out free silicon bumpers, we had the early App Store. At the time, all of the mere 100,000 apps were made for tiny little original-iPhone screens. The iPad, with its larger and more-square display, simply couldn't render the iPhone apps full-screen without stretching or cropping them.

To spare 1st-gen iPad buyers from having to wait for the developer community to build apps tailored for the iPad, Apple decided to band-aid the problem by simply centering the iPhone apps in the middle of the iPad screen. It's not the most elegant fix, but it worked well-enough and Apple had faith that the developers would come through.

---

With your iPhone app floating in the middle of your screen, you have two options: By default the apps would render at "1X" (appearing exactly as you would see them on an iPhone) or by tapping a little button in the bottom right corner you could switch to "2X" and it would "zoom in" to fill more of the screen.

The weird thing is, even when you hit the "expand" button to zoom in, it still doesn't fill the screen completely... Instead of stretching to 100% in one direction and letterboxing the other (like watching a "wide-screen" movie with black bars on 2 sides), Apple opted to letterbox all four sides.

This probably made a lot of sense back in 2010 given the difference between iPhone and iPad's aspect-ratios and resolutions. 2X was as big as you could scale an app and still come out with an even number of pixels, which was important to keep apps from appearing blurry or distorted.

I can't help but remember watching Steve on stage saying "touch surfaces don't want to be vertical; It doesn't work. [...] After a short period of time, you start to fatigue, and after an extended period of time, your arm wants to fall off."

This was 6 months after the release of the original iPad and Steve -himself- saying with finality, "it doesn't work."

---

After years of owning iPads, I would go so far as to say "I am unconvinced by the 'tablet' form-factor in its entirety". It's fun to imagine myself carrying an iPad to read in the park or doodle on the go, but the reality of my experience is that it's a lousy and uncomfortable device to hold for any length of time.

Credit to Steve for nailing it on the UX, but while he was criticizing the idea of "touchscreen Macs", I would argue that "handheld iPads" are even worse because you have to hold it steady while you impotently jab at it with your free hand. (Hope you don't wanna drink a coffee or enjoy a snack while you're using that iPad).

---

All of this ultimately brings me to my grievance: the iPad is a computer —so it should come as no surprise that it works best as a computer (with a keyboard like a laptop). Apple knows this —they made a whole series of "iPad is a computer" ads— and yet their OS still doesn't think like a computer.

Covers eventually evolved into keyboards, and now we have an iPad with a keyboard and a trackpad. It certainly looks a lot like the touchscreen Mac that Steve said "doesn't work", so why are we stuck pretending? Despite all of the changes to the contrary, the iPad is still "portrait"-first (just like the iPhone). For your enjoyment, a case-study:

Let's take a peek at Robinhood, the Millennial-friendly, no-fees stock-trading app (which saved Apple's market cap in 2020) to see how my portfolio is doing.

Given Apple's reputation for "magical" UX, you'd be forgiven for assuming that I'm the idiot here and I've simply locked my screen orientation and forgotten about it, but I really haven't.

Now I've been an Apple-apologizer for years. I've made all manner of excuses for why they're late to release some "critical features" or why they're entitled to make other seemingly bad or incongruous choices, but I just can't see the justification here.

With all of the technological progress and the fact that even the iPad Mini (with its "diminutive" resolution of 2048-by-1536) still has more than enough real-estate to render iPhone apps "sideways" so they can appear upright while using your iPad in landscape (as you would with a keyboard).

To help visualize the differences between then and now (and illustrate why an update is overdue), I've made some 'simple' graphics showing the various iPad screens relative to the original iPhone's screen (which was a 2-by-3 aspect-ratio, 320x480 rectangle).

On an iPad Mini you could easily fit an "iPhone app" on half of the screen at "3X"... that would free you to use the other half of your screen for multitasking (or just improve the experience of using a keyboard).

On an 11" Pro you could get that same 3X in 'landscape' (or 4X on the 12.9" iPad Pro). In 'portrait' orientation, you could stretch the apps even bigger to a full 5x if you don't mind cropping about 4 pixels off the top and bottom of the apps (approximately 1/2 a millimeter... which is less than the rounding in the corners).

Eyeballing it, I’m guessing Apple now uses the 5:9 aspect-ratio from the iPhone 5, but the point stands that there is so much opportunity to improve the experience now where previously (a decade ago) there was none.

---

At the time the iPad was released, it felt like Apple was convinced that developers would flock to the opportunity to build all-new apps for iPad. Many -but not all- have, which is why I’m still looking at sideways apps in 2020.

I think the design-lesson in all of this is to take detailed notes as you do your work; Be honest about your design's problem-areas, and revisit the ugly solutions from time to time.

Products, markets, people, and minds change; Old technical constraints shouldn't limit your future. If you're open and honest about the compromises you made, you'll be better equipped to remedy those disappointments when the opportunities arise.

Don't let band-aids become "the way we've always done things".

Finally, for anyone at Apple who might come across this, I have four easy options for potential solutions that there might still be time to squeeze into the next release of iPad OS.

---

Thanks for reading. For more design honesty and maybe some wisdom, visit my portfolio, drop me a line, or offer me a job.

See ya' later, Cowpoke.