Early adopters of Apple’s newest flagship phones are having a rougher time than expected and it’s not a good look.
Did you pick up a shiny new iPhone 13 Pro expecting silky-smooth 120-Hz animations and seamless integration with an Apple Watch? I know I sure did, but things haven’t gone as expected on Apple’s new smartphone platform right out of the gate. One would think that Apple tested its APIs with the Pro Motion Display and paired an Apple Watch with the phone at some point, but two big bugs have sullied the iPhone 13 Pro experience for new owners right out of the gate. First up is that the adaptive refresh display in the iPhone 13 Pro and Pro Max may not always run animations as smoothly as it possibly can. Apple’s most commonly-used graphics frameworks — UIKit, SwiftUI, CoreAnimation. CAAnimation, and SpriteKit — automatically pace animations and the Pro Motion Display will run those at 120 Hz. We can confirm that by setting an iPhone 13 Pro side-by-side with an iPhone 12 Pro Max, both running iOS 15, and it’s very obvious that the new iPhone’s animation is smoother when scrolling Twitter and Instagram. For the most part, it just works as it’s intended, but that’s not always the case. When an app uses the CoreAnimation framework and sync the timing to the display using theAPI, the animation may run at any refresh rate that the display supports.
