iPhone 6 Screen Size and Web Design Tips

Apple updated its iPhone a bit ago making the form factor much bigger. The iPhone 6 screen size is both wider and taller and the iPhone 6 Plus also has a higher pixel density. This is an update to my previous post about designing websites for the iPhone 5. It’ll cover these new screen sizes and try to clarify how this all works.

Update 1: Apple has released the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus. The iPhone 6s screen size is identical to the previous iPhone 6 versions.

Update 2: Apple just announced the iPhone 7 & 7 Plus. These iPhone 7 models follow the same screen sizes as the 6s & 6s Plus.

iPhone Screen Measurements:

There are a few different values to consider when looking at the iPhone screen sizes. I’m going to get these values defined here so the chart below makes more sense:

iPhone Display Size (inches): This is diagonal measure of the screen, from corner to corner, just like you’d measure a TV.

iPhone Screen Size (points): These points are the size that the device is using for coordinates. If you’re designing for the web (using CSS or JavaScript) these values will be helpful. iPhones use Retina screens which have a higher pixel density. This means they take the larger iPhone resolution (mentioned above) and compress those pixels into a smaller space to make the image look sharper.

iPhone Rendered Pixels: This is the full number of pixels that are being rendered. This is the value you get when you apply the multiplier (1x, 2x, 3x) the device uses to the screen size in points. If you’re creating an image and want it at the max resolution, this is the size you’d use. I’ve also written an article on Retina images if you’d like to learn more.

iPhone Physical Pixels: This is the actual screen’s pixel resolution. The iPhone 6 Plus is using a a larger image resolution on a screen with a smaller number of physical pixels, so it needs to be downsampled to this size. This value is really only important in a specifications perspective, but shouldn’t really affect your designs.

Using the iPhone 6 Screen Size for Web Design:

If you’re coding your site using Responsive design in order to fit the iPhone well, you may have some sizing issues if you don’t tell the device not to zoom in. You can do this by adding this viewport metatag into the head of your site:

<meta name=”viewport” content=”initial-scale=1.0″>