Web designers are intimately familiar with the term “responsive web design”. This is a layout which adapts & responds based on the screen’s current size.
Mobile applications have not exactly following this same rhetoric. Apple devices originally started with just the iPhone screen. This grew into iPhone screens with smaller & larger dimensions, plus iPad screens with alternate dimensions. App development has been turned into a spectrum of support with many chaotic parts.
Mobile app design needs its responsive revolution – and it seems Twitter is taking a step forward in this direction.
Just announced in their recent blog post, Twitter has released a new mobile app that fully supports all iOS devices in one unified library of code. The redesign maintains consistent features and interface experiences between a multitude of devices.
The team at Twitter refers to this as Adaptive UI.
Reading your Timeline should be a great experience on any iOS device, no matter the screen size or orientation. For this reason, we must consider different devices and their characteristics. So we built our own responsive system, starting with the typographic elements that make a great reading experience, and built from there.
Their goal is to create one single application that adapts based on certain characteristics of the device. These characteristics could be screen dimensions, font size, or device orientation(among others).
As far as I’m aware, this is the first major company actively working to simplify the mobile app design process.
It’s clear that website designers have truly benefitted from the advancements of responsive design. Could adaptive UI techniques be the same equivalent for iOS + Android developers? Time holds the answer. But either way it’s clear that Twitter is willing to pioneer this technology by steamrolling a new route towards more unified & concise iOS app development.
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