Designing Tablet and Large-Screen Layouts as a First-Class Citizen
A common request from clients is 'make the phone app work on iPad too,' and the naive path — auto-layout constraints stretching the same single-column UI to fill a 12.9-inch screen — reliably produces the classic complaint of oversized buttons and awkward whitespace. For a project management app we built, we instead treated iPad as a two-pane, master-detail layout from the start: a list of projects on the left, project detail on the right, using UISplitViewController rather than scaling the phone's navigation stack.
Breakpoints did more work than device-type checks. Rather than branching logic on 'is this an iPad,' we sized layout decisions off available width using SwiftUI's size classes — compact and regular — which handled iPad Split View and Slide Over correctly. An iPad in a narrow multitasking pane should get the phone-style single column layout, and device-type checks alone miss that entirely.
On Android, we used the WindowSizeClass APIs from Jetpack's Compose window size class library to make the same width-based decisions, which also correctly handled foldables — a Galaxy Fold's inner screen crossing from compact to medium width class when unfolded, without any special-casing for that specific device.
Input method mattered as much as screen size. iPad users with a trackpad or Apple Pencil expect hover states and precise pointer targets that don't exist on a phone touch interface; we added hover effects to interactive elements and increased hit-target precision requirements for pointer input specifically, rather than keeping the same 44pt minimum touch target sizing designed for fingers.
The organizational cost of doing this properly is real — it roughly doubles design review time for any new screen, since every layout needs a compact and regular variant reviewed together. We now scope tablet support as its own line item in project estimates rather than folding it into 'responsive design' as an assumed freebie, because clients who saw the two-pane iPad layout in a demo consistently valued it enough to justify the extra time.
