Things have been a bit slower than intended around here, but I am getting my apps updated for iOS 8 and the iPhone 6 and 6 plus.
I should mention, I did test my apps against iOS 8 (beta 5) in August and things all appeared to be working fine, so I don’t anticipate that anything has broken since Apple released 8 to the public yesterday.
Overlord! has just been submitted to Apple, it went first as I was already working on some tweaks for it when the information about the embiggened iPhones came out. I’ll post an announcement when it’s been released.
I’m a bit hesitant though as I sort of expect we might see a new iPad size or resolution next month, which will mean everything would have to be updated yet again to support it. Apart from rumours of an iPad Pro or Plus or whatever, there’s some hints that I think suggest a new iPad resolution of 2400×1800 pixels (or 1200 x 900 @2x retina).
It’s not that it’d be a huge amount of work, just the app update / submission / approval / release process itself is a huge pain in the arse and Apple sort of actively punishes developers for updating, by wiping out all the reviews and ratings every time you update.
So you work hard to build a good app and get a good reputation, then do the right thing and release an update, and they punish you by taking away your reputation and showing the app as not-rated again. Thanks Apple, we appreciate that.
(Incidently that’s why you see apps that nag you to leave reviews or ‘rate this app’. Because even if you have already rated & reviewed it, that was all wiped when the dev released a new update. So every update needs to be rated / reviewed. I won’t nag you in my apps for ratings / reviews, but I would very much appreciate if you would rate & review. Thanks!)
Anyhow, app-submission headaches aside, they’ve been dropping hints for 2 years that device sizes would be changing so I’ve built all my apps accordingly, so they already respond to varied sizes and dimensions. The aggravation is that Apple doesn’t just automatically let apps adapt to new phone (or iPad) sizes.
You have to ‘unlock’ the new size by including the appropriately sized launch image.
That’s it. Just a specific sized PNG in the app bundle.
But you can’t do that till they unlock the appropriate size in the development tools, which doesn’t happen till after they have their big announcements, etc. etc.
So you have different launch images for every device (and every orientation you support). Then there’s all the app icons. Different sizes. @2x. Now @3x as well…
Anyhow, I’ve wandered off into a bit of a rant. Sorry about that.
App updates are forthcoming. I’m still here, just keeping quiet as I deal with some stuff. Stay tuned for more news.