Will apps look horribly distorted on a 720p screen?

[FreakyLocz14]

I remember when qHD started coming out, and apps that were optimized for WVGA (the large majority of them) looked distorted. A lot of apps are still adjusting to qHD. I have a feeling that I might not want to hop on the 720p bandwagon this early because of this. I skipped the Nexus S for a T-Mobile Galaxy S 4G because it was horribly disappointing with the lack of 4G and 720p video recording. The Prime looks like it will not be disappointing, but I'm worried about distorted apps.

 

[BitGambit]

I would much rather prefer black bars as opposed to stretching (distorted).. I'm unfamiliar with android, is there any kind of options to choose this?

 

[yapkuen]

I don't think the issue is so much distortion (stretching/compressing from one aspect ratio to another aspect ratio), as most modern Android devices have the same widescreen aspect ratio as it is pixelation from stretching an app beyond its capability to fill a larger screen. I'm not sure if users or developers are given control over how much an app will stretch; I downloaded Hex Defense on a Xoom when Honeycomb tablets first came out, and it looked super terrible because it was phone-optimized.

 

[Cory Streater]

Good question. It's something I've wondered/worried about as well. My guess is that there are a lot of developer's coding their apps in anticipation of higher resolution devices.

 

[FreakyLocz14]

Good question. It's something I've wondered/worried about as well. My guess is that there are a lot of developer's coding their apps in anticipation of higher resolution devices.

Perhaps some are, but I recall that when qHD screens first came out, many popular apps were not coded for qHD displays. The official Facebook app is a prime example of this.

 

[Holsum]

my understanding is with the new ICS SDK there will be the option of built in for screen rendering based off of variable calls. This way developers wont have to completely re-develope for new platforms. whether this has been implemented in older release i am not sure (not a developer).

so, if developers use HD settings their apps should be adjusted based off of the rendering of the device and the call that is made to theAPI, hopefully.....

 

[mavrrick]

If it is anything like what happens in Honeycomb, which i expect it to be. You will have two options for how to scale it out. or not do it at all. I haven't seen anything look that bad on my Xoom. So I can't imagine it would make a huge difference with a 4.5ish screen with a higher resoultion.

 

[sblantipodi]

Good question. It's something I've wondered/worried about as well. My guess is that there are a lot of developer's coding their apps in anticipation of higher resolution devices.

Our apps is ready for 720x1200 resolution and high density pixel display.
Gingerbread offers some help to developers to support high res display.

The things that bothered us mostly was the huge DPI not the display resolution.
In any case our apps are ready and I think that other developers will fix their apps also.

 

[CynicX]

There is a patch for Honeycomb that lets you set how you want a phone app to be shown on a tablet. I've gotten used to just dealing with it. Usually the issue are text fields that just look silly because they run all the way across the screen.

I'm am VERY curious how Google is going to pull this off. Honeycomb is my first experience with Android. So learning on it wasn't bad and I understood some apps just didn't work perfectly screen wise. What I'm going to find curious is how some of you guys will deal with it if ics has some of these issues. Years of properly optimized apps and now that might go away....

 

[sblantipodi]

What I'm going to find curious is how some of you guys will deal with it if ics has some of these issues. Years of properly optimized apps and now that might go away....

We have written a portable UI Toolkit so we don't use the honeycomb, gingerbread or ics api, this creates a much better portable interfaces and we have more power to manage our UI from a 240x320 device to an HD TV 1920x1200 to a huge dpi phone like the prime.

This is an home made solution made by us, it works perfectly but it requires a lot of time, I don't know how small developers will react to the huge DPI and resolution. In any case honeycomb is giving to developers more tool to make portable apis, I suppose that ICS will do the same.

 

[E_man]

The app won't stretch, it will just look less sharp than an app made for an 720p display. This isn't honeycomb on a 10" device, there won't be a need for a "phone mode". It will always run in phone mode, unless google decides tablet mode is ok for phones.

That said, the apps that are in trouble are the ones that follow bad coding practices and code their app in hard pixel values. If they coded it properly using relationships to other things on the screen or screen edges, then they will have no problem.

 

[sblantipodi]

The app won't stretch, it will just look less sharp than an app made for an 720p display. This isn't honeycomb on a 10" device, there won't be a need for a "phone mode". It will always run in phone mode, unless google decides tablet mode is ok for phones.

It all depends on how ICS will treat the apps designed for lower res display.

That said, the apps that are in trouble are the ones that follow bad coding practices and code their app in hard pixel values. If they coded it properly using relationships to other things on the screen or screen edges, then they will have no problem.

more easy to say than to do
one things is sure, when ICS will be released, not every apps will be ready.

 

[deV14nt]

My understanding is the OS itself is designed well for scaling, right down to images with predefined stretchable regions. For example, you could make a circle and define the center pixels as stretchable and it would become a bigger and bigger rectangle with rounded corners as you increased resolution. You can also provide different images and resources for various screen sizes. Supposedly, additional ways to defined resources for different categories of screen size became available in recent versions, though I can't remember which one specifically. Anyway, the improvements are definitely still there in ICS.

It's all up to the developers whether they choose to use all of the many ways to make their app scale well.

 

[sblantipodi]

It's all up to the developers whether they choose to use all of the many ways to make their app scale well.

the point is that a good apps, looking good, don't need the scaling option.
scaling is for weak app that doesn't have a native support for that resolution.

 

[E_man]

It all depends on how ICS will treat the apps designed for lower res display.

I think we can say with 100% certainty that ICS will not have phone apps run in tablet mode (aweful usability), and we can also say it won't automatically scale them to 2.9" (the part of the display that is 800x480 assuming the Nexus has a 720p 4.6" display) unless the dev coded it to hard pixel values. The only thing left is to scale it up, like they did in honeycomb. The only reason they offered a zoom mode was because some apps don't have their layouts scale 6-7x. Scaling 1.2x should not be a problem for a properly coded app.

more easy to say than to do
one things is sure, when ICS will be released, not every apps will be ready.

It's not hard if done from the start, especially with the different layouts for different screen sizes built in to older versions of the SDK, something I can see them even improving with ICS (maybe add a xhdpi layout?). Rule of thumb, if you ever see yourself putting a hard pixel value in your layout, take a break. You've probably been working too hard for too long. That is, unless you have a very compelling reason. Otherwise, the dev can't complain that their app broke.

the point is that a good apps, looking good, don't need the scaling option.
scaling is for weak app that doesn't have a native support for that resolution.

I disagree. Why hardcode your app for a different layout for every resolution? That seems like a weaker app that took the easier (upfront) less scalable method. You need the flexibility in the android market where they can release any screen size with any resolution tommorow. Unless I misunderstand you.

 

[sblantipodi]

Scaling 1.2x should not be a problem for a properly coded app.

The problem is that android market is full of baby developers and there is too few properly coded apps

 

[sblantipodi]

I disagree. Why hardcode your app for a different layout for every resolution? That seems like a weaker app that took the easier (upfront) less scalable method. You need the flexibility in the android market where they can release any screen size with any resolution tommorow. Unless I misunderstand you.

Scaling is something not wanted, is a workaround for apps that doesn't support big resolution.
A properly coded app don't need the scale and it looks much sharper and "well balanced".

 

[Droid800]

All it takes is google updating the SDK, and developers updating their apps. Not a big deal.

 

[FreakyLocz14]

All it takes is google updating the SDK, and developers updating their apps. Not a big deal.

May devs haven't even updated for qHD yet.

 

[zkSharks]

While supporting screens with proper design structuring and image resolutions will still need to be implemented, if anyone is wondering about how applications will display differently between tablet and phone devices, check out the 'Fragment' modular UI implementation:

Fragment Overview: Fragments | Android Developers
Simple Example: Android Developers Blog: The Android 3.0 Fragments API

Such a structure allows applications to be split into, well, fragments, which have different visibility/response characteristics depending on device type/resolution.