iOS 7 Compliant Apps

I used the past week, and Thursday in particular, to look into the topic more closely and get a better feeling for the effort involved in general. It remains clear, however, that it depends heavily on the app itself.

First stop: the Transition Guide

You could read many personal opinions about the specifics of the iOS 7 design language early on, ranging from good to bad. What they likely all had in common was a small culture shock. While looking for what Apple actually considers compliant, I came across Apple's iOS 7 Transition Guide, which addresses the most important points. You can find the document here.

The section "Scoping the Project" reassured me, because I have generally developed more data-driven apps for my customers, and because the requirement list under "Things Every App Must Do" is particularly short.

New icons are not enough

Two out of the three tasks that every app must fulfill are graphical in nature and require updated graphics for the icon and launch screen.

My next step was to compile the app with the iOS 7 SDK. It quickly became obvious that simply updating the icons was not enough. The following image shows that the navigation bar and the status bar overlap the list entries. In addition, the navigation bar is no longer black as it was on the left under iOS 6.

The reason for this is that iOS 7 wants to give content more room. As a result, the app now receives the full available screen dimensions, and the navigation and status bar are displayed above the content.

Possible solutions

Assuming that I am not using Xcode to build my layout, there are, in my opinion, two possible solutions. The first means adjusting the position values of all controls. That can quickly become more time-consuming.

I prefer the second option. With iOS 7, developers gained the EdgesForExtendedLayout property. It can be used to determine how the app should provide its layout. This already fixes the more obvious display issues. After that, only individual controls, especially near the bottom of the screen, may still need to be repositioned. The following code helps:

int SystemVersion = Convert.ToInt16 (UIDevice.CurrentDevice.SystemVersion.Split ('.') [0]);
if (SystemVersion >= 7)
{
    EdgesForExtendedLayout = UIRectEdge.None;
    NavigationController.NavigationBar.BarStyle = UIBarStyle.Black;
}

By checking for iOS 7, you avoid crashes on older devices. To make the navigation bar black again, NavigationController.NavigationBar.BarStyle = UIBarStyle.Black; does the trick.

Conclusion

For my part, I no longer consider the effort required to adapt an existing app to the iOS 7 design to be all that high. Of course, I am aware that an app with heavier custom design work will require more effort, even though the possible solutions remain similar. Xamarin apparently came to the same conclusion that Thursday and published an article on the topic. Because of the time difference, however, it reached me too late.