"Apple removing the iPhone SE from sale does not mean you can stop designing for its resolution soon. Non-Plus iPhones can be used in zoomed mode, which means they’ll have the same logical resolution as an SE."

https://twitter.com/cocoafrog/status/1040144381112721408

Yeah, between that and current stock it’s going to be quite a long time before you can truly give up on it.

Analytics will help you know. But at least it’s not still selling new for a few more years.

Fwiw as a developer, being able to debug shaders, tinker with ARKit and have some sort of middle-ground baseline specs as my primary/everyday device is a huge win for me personally.

When „designing“ views I tend to face challenges from the other end of the spectrum: „what am I going to put here so there‘s not too much empty/negative space on the larger screens without making the layout look empty or clunky?“

There are ways they could fit a higher resolution and screen into that form factor. They’re just not interested in breaking their notch trend.

Every part of this is wrong. But the "notch trend" bit is hilarious. The idea that the notch is a "trend" Apple started on purpose, rather than a design element that was necessitated by making a full-screen phone that still needs to have 9 sensors and devices pointing forwards is laughable enough, but the idea that Apple would refuse to implement another design because of the "notch trend" is full-on goofy. Apple doesn't think or work that way.

If you increased the effective resolution the touch targets would get very hard to use.

I don’t think the notch is a factor in this.

Apple knows how many they sell. I’m guessing their sales metrics show it’s just a tiny tiny portion of sales. The fact it’s no longer similar to other phones they’re still selling means the economy of scale isn’t there anymore.

I love the SE, but this is my biggest gripe - apps don't consistently work well on them, which IMO is one of the features of the Apple ecosystem (compared to Android, which is a shitshow of different device sizes/landscapes).

Really? Which apps have issues? I'm an SE user and I can't say I've experienced any problems that seem like screen size issues.

It's funny how a few years ago iOS developers griped about things when the iphone 6 plus suddenly came out. Of course back then, autolayout was still only 1-2 years old.

SE is great for developers, since it sets a reasonable minimum bar for screen resolution.

In my experience, it’s TOO minimum relative to the 6, 6+, and X.

Agreed. Having to support both the iPhone SE and the iPhone X aspect ratio is really difficult since they are on opposite extremes. I'm quite pleased with the removal of this size configuration - hopefully in about 2 years we won't need to keep supporting it.