Yesterday, Apple unveiled a bunch of new iPhones: the iPhone 8, the iPhone 8 Plus and the iPhone X. Chances are that by the time you read these lines, you’ve already read tons of articles on yesterday’s keynote so we’ll not be regiving you information that you already have — or that you could have here or here.

 

So what should you take into account for the future of your apps?

 

Your app with the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus

 

It’s pretty simple: the screen does not change, the resolution does not change, even the features nearly do not change.

For your app to be compatible with the iPhone 8, good news: you don’t need to do anything… except of course make your app compatible with iOS 11!

 

Your app with the iPhone X

 

Regarding the iPhone X, there’s an important screen size and screen resolution change: the new screen size will be 5.8 inches compared to the 5.5 inches of the 6/7/8 Plus while the resolution will go from 1920×1080 to 2436×1125 pixels.

For your app to fully take advantage of this new resolution, you should plan an update of your UI to these new sizes. If you don’t, your app’s UI will adapt itself but won’t be 100% optimized. Think about pre-iPhone 6 apps running on an iPhone 6, it was working but it was not that beautiful.

Alongside with the screen update, the Touch ID is removed from the iPhone X and replaced by the Face ID, a technology that uses the user’s face for identification rather than its fingerprints.

If your app is already using Touch ID, the transition to Face ID should be nearly seamless, plan a test to ensure it’s fully compatible and if not, the code update will be quite straightforward.

Don’t be frightened by the security level, as with Touch ID, Face ID’s security is backed by a hardware secure enclave and is even more secure than Touch ID in the way that Face ID takes more biometric points from your face than it was doing with fingerprints.

Except from the screen size and Touch ID, you don’t need to do anything else than being compatible with iOS 11 to have a full support of the iPhone X.

 

What innovative features are unlocked by the new iPhones?

 

There are three opportunities that we foresee to take your app up to the next level with these new iPhones:

  • ARKit: This iOS 11 feature combined to the new AR-optimized lens of the iPhone 8, the iPhone 8 Plus and the iPhone X gets the AR to a whole new level by bringing to the developers a pretty much advanced understanding of the physical space around them.
  • Face scanning: if you did not see this Apple “Animojis” video with iMessage, just click here! This technology is available to the developers and so to your apps of course.
  • And last but not least, Mobile AI is about to go a step further with hardware optimizations of Machine Learning in these new iPhones and the Core ML framework of iOS 11… expect more powerful “AI at the Edge” rather than having to fully rely on the cloud.