Apple’s WWDC sessions usually offer a mix of developer guidance and subtle hardware tea leaves.And last week, one passing comment during the explanation of an SDK change caught attention for what it might suggest about a particular future device.In a session called “Make your UIKit app more flexible,” Apple confirmed that starting with the iOS 26 SDK, apps will no longer be automatically letterboxed or scaled on new screen sizes when running on future hardware.
Historically, when Apple introduced a taller iPhone, a new iPad aspect ratio, or any other form factor shift, apps built with older SDKs would default to running in a scaled or letterboxed mode.Developers would only get true native rendering once they updated their app against the latest SDK and resubmitted it to the App Store.With iOS 26, that behavior changes.
Quoting directly from the session: That may sound like a small technical tweak, but the timing and the specific language around “new hardware” and “new screen size” feel… notable.As pre-iPad 9to5Mac readers will remember, Apple doesn’t typically enforce this kind of preemptive UI flexibility unless it’s gearing up for a form factor where scaled apps would look especially bad.And given the ongoing rumors about a foldable iPhone in development, it’s hard not to read this as the clearest OS-level sign yet that bigger display changes are coming.
The aspect ratio game Last month, Weibo leaker Digital Chat Station shared the following claim on the foldable iPhone’s aspect ratio: Modern iPhones typically have an aspect ratio of 19.5:9, with some older models using 16:9.Meanwhile, current iPads have either a 3:4 or a 16:23 aspect ratio, depending on the model.Put simply: it looks like the foldable iPhone’s large internal display might have its own specific aspect ratio, and Apple may already be laying the groundwork to avoid any letterboxing that could hurt first impressions.
Foldable or no foldable, apps need to flex While Apple stopped short of naming any specific device categories, the session’s focus on “future hardware” and non-standard screen sizes does line up neatly with the kind of UI challenges a foldable phone would introduce, especially in its unfolded state.For developers, the takeaway is straightforward: If your app’s UI isn’t already ready to scale fluidly across arbitrary screen sizes, now’s the time to fix that.For everyone else? File this under yet another small-but-interesting breadcrumb on Apple’s long road toward whatever comes next in iPhone hardware design.
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