iOS 6 Automatically Scales to Fit Taller iPhone Display

Recently it has been discovered through some testing with Apple's official iOS simulator that iOS 6 is capable of automatically scaling its home screen display to fit a taller 1136x640 display, compared to the current 960x640 display. Numerous rumors and part leaks have indicated that Apple will be including a taller display on the next-generation iPhone to be introduced next month.

iOS simulator at 1136x640 with five rows of icons under iOS 6 and four rows under iOS 5.1

Thanks to some tweaks to the iOS Simulator application that is included in the iOS development tools, we were able to run the simulator at the rumored next-generation iPhone display resolution of 640 x 1136. We did this running both the current public release of iOS 5.1 and the upcoming iOS 6.0 The iOS 5.1 simulator displayed the home screen with a stretched set of four rows of icons. On the other hand, iOS 6 displayed five complete rows – as our sources said Apple was testing for taller iPhone displays.

Notably, setting the iOS simulator to resolutions other than 1136x640 does not result in automatic scaling, with the software instead simply defaulting to an "iPad-like home screen layout" different from what is seen for the iPhone. The observation suggests that there is something special about that 1136x640 resolution that suggests Apple has at least been working on an iOS 6 device supporting that screen size.