[jbjb]

Originally Posted by PatNY

Hmmm ... can you name a single consumer app that scaled before iOS6?

Why are only consumer apps relevant?

Or a reference on the internet to a single popular non-esoteric iOS app that scaled before iOS6?

Apps tend not to give details like their use of springs and struts vs auto layout vs hand-scaled on their App Store pages, so it's not clear what sort of evidence would convince you.

Whether or not S&S are perfectly adequate is beside the point. If it wasn't practical for various reasons -- and it appears that was the case -- then it still rendered iOS before iOS6 essentially a non-scalable interface.

This is quite simple - I really don't see where the difficulty in understanding it is coming form.

For some interfaces S&S are perfectly adequate (e.g. the app I referenced above). For some they aren't good enough and auto-layout is required. For yet others, individually crafted optimal UIs for each device type are worth the effort.

All those options are available to iOS developers.

The big difference between iOS and Android is the pain involved in the last of those approaches. There are vastly more combinations of size, resolution and aspect ratio available for android, so covering each of those with a hand-crafted optimal layout is much more painful.

The limited range of iOS devices means that such an approach is, in general, perfectly feasible. Hence many developers choose it. That doesn't, however, mean that they choose it because they don't have the other options available.

Even more relevant is the state of affairs for the bulk of the history of that operating system. And the evidence seems to suggest any scalability before iOS6 was non-existent and/or impractical and rarely if ever used.

The discussion was about your claim that Apple *is* (i.e. now) being held back by lack of UI scalability in iOS. I'd say the state of affairs for the last 2 major releases of the system is more relevant to that discussion than a release two generations out of date.

/JB