Most designers who design mobile apps seem to come from the web world where UI elements, pages are all measured in pixels. Remember the 960 pixel page width set by default in mockup tools?

It would be worthwhile installing Apple Xcode and designing a few screens with the tool. In Xcode UI elements are measured in points not pixels. After this little exercise I think designers going back to Sketch will convince themselves that designing mobile apps at 1x is the way forward.

A nice benefit is designers might have a better understanding of the engineer’s side of the process hence reducing misalignment between design and build.

As a side note, I think another reason why many designers went 2x is that they used pixel based tools like Photoshop. If you design at 1x in Photoshop you couldn’t export assets in higher resolutions without pixelation.

But with vector design tool like Sketch, designing at 1x is the most effective and efficient way.