The new iPhone Xs Max is the biggest yet and it’ll mess with your apps 😨
Last night, European time, Apple held their yearly iPhone launch event at the Steve Jobs Theatre in Cupertino, CA. In the presentation, which is an admittedly nerdy affair, tens of millions of people watched the unveiling of the latest models of the iPhone and the Apple Watch.
Apple’s new flagship phones are called iPhone Xs and iPhone Xs Max. Perplexingly, the Xs doesn’t mean it’s a small phone by any measure — in fact the Xs Max comes with the largest screen of any iPhone to date with offering a massive 2688 by 1242 pixels resolution, while retaining the controversial notch and rounded corners introduced in last year’s iPhone X.
The screen of the Xs Max introduces yet another new resolution, which means updates are required of our apps, to ensure the user interface looks great for the new, larger screen and we’re rolling these changes straight into the updates of our utility customer engagement apps.
I remember getting my Iphone X last year. The quirky new layout of the screen was quickly embraced by many of my favourite apps; Uber, Netflix and of course Eliq’s utility customer engagement apps. As a consumer, I wouldn’t expect anything else, however, for the longest time poorly maintained apps would not cope well with the new screen size. At best, these apps would simply not make use of the top and bottom sections of the screen, due to the roundness of the corners. At worst, the UI was impaired, with menu buttons stuck underneath the bottom “home” bar, making them virtually unreachable.
Iphone X users understood quickly which apps were important enough to their providers to be kept up-to-date, and which ones were not. Sadly most apps from utilities fall in the second category and looking in App Store today — a full year after the iPhone X screen was announced, a large portion of utility and energy apps have still not been updated to fit the new phones.
Consumers expectations for an app in the energy space aren’t set by other services offered by the industry, but rather by other apps and other consumer companies. A project-based, “waterfall” approach to customer engagement apps leads to poorly maintained, static products which quickly look out-of-date.
The way to maintain a customer experience that keeps looking fresh and work with new phones and screens is to dedicate a team to the task, using an in-house team or a customer engagement SaaS application provider such as Eliq 😉
