To iPhone 5 or not to iPhone 5

I had an interesting time recently with Apple’s review process. So far, for me at least, App reviews have been largely uneventful.

I’d previously posted on Twitter that I’d added support for the iPhone 5’s and iPod touch 5th gen’s bigger screens.

It was pretty easy to do:

  • Create a new launch screen image of the right dimensions and name it Default-568h@2x.png (iOS 6 spots this and enables fullscreen on the iPhone 5).
  • Make some minor changes to reposition some of the screen elements.

All in all it was pretty painless as I’d been sensible and designed the UI to scale anyway.

As Xcode 4.5 can no longer generate ARM6 code (required to support the older iPod touch 2G), I went back to Xcode 3.2 to make the final build and submitted it.

A few minutes later I got this message back from Apple:

Invalid Launch Image – Your app contains a launch image with a size modifier that is only supported for apps built with the iOS 6.0 SDK or later.

Hmm.. bit strange. After googling for a bit it turns out you have to use Xcode 4.5+ if you want to support the bigger screens. Doing so, of course, means iPod touch 2G users can no longer upgrade.

Most people will tell you this isn’t a concern as these users don’t buy anything from the App Store anymore.

To be sure, I had a look at the server logs for the in-app purchases and found there were a few of them still out there buying stuff – “a few”, in this case, meaning “not many”.

I resubmitted with Default-568h@2x.png removed to disable the bigger screen support and Apple approved it.

Oddly though, they’ve still put the bigger screenshots on the App Store which is a bit misleading:

In the short term, my current plan is:

  • Ship 4.0 which will still include support for iPod touch 2G users (this is currently in review).
  • Once approved, I will submit 4.1 which will enable support for the iPhone 5/iPod touch 5th gen screen.
  • The iPod touch 2G will then be no longer supported.

Apologies in the meantime for the inconvenience to any iPhone 5/iPod touch 5G users out there.