Patrick Robert Doyle (Head of Design at gowago.ch) recently wrote an article about why we should design for a tiny broken phone as we design our products. He explains how our new UI’s are tested on a variety of devices but focus more on the new rather than the old.
Our UIs look sublime on the latest devices. Novel solutions to the Apple Notch or camera punch-hole earn us waves of ❤️Likes on Dribbble. But these giant, pristinely preserved, edge-to-edge screens where the top-left corner has never been touched by a right thumb makes up only 20% of the traffic that finds our website, gowago.ch, today.
Patrick Robert Doyle
I am lucky enough that my daughter has an iPhone SE (gen 1) that is a wi-fi device to test how new screens render on the smaller screen size. I also wonder with Apple releasing the new iPhone SE (gen 2) with a larger screen size will mean Apple will drop support for the smaller screen size in iOS 14. WWDC is right around the corner, and I am sure we will find out more then.
Until then, we absolutely should continue to support older devices with our products. You can read Patrick’s full article here.
