Question

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How to deal with iPhone 5 screen size?

So with the release of iPhone 5 today and a larger screen height, how do we accommodate for different screen sizes across the different iPhone variants in our apps. I understand that apps which are not updated for iPhone 5 will be “letter boxed”, but what about backwards compatibility?

Is there a way to check whether the app is running on an iPhone 3, 4 or 5?

Answer 1

You normally don’t need that, because checking the hardware is not the right approach.

If you need to base decisions in your app on the screen size, like accomodate to the screen size for your UI, you should… test the screen size, not make some conditions on the hardware. Always test what is really necessary.

Use [UIScreen mainScreen].bounds for that (as you should always have done). Note that even before iPhone 5, one could plug its iPhone on a videoprojector or external screen and display its app on a screen with different resolution than the iPhone. That’s why I hope that you never use magic numbers in your code (And if you did, you know why it’s bad now ;)) and was already using constants or asking at runtime for the size of your screen.

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Anyway, to accomodate for different screen sizes, if you configured your autoresizing mask correctly in your views, your applications will resize automagically. You just need to provide a [e-mail] launch image and your app will take the full size of the 4″ screen.

Moreover, starting iOS6, you will be able to use AutoLayout to do finer constrainted layout of your views. See the WWDC’12 videos sessions that explains it in detail.