The game meets a real iPhone
Two days in, a signed build ran on an iPhone for the first time. The next morning the game learned 120 Hz, and on 3 October a stress test held it.
From the developer 2 min read Milestone date: Posted
Until the evening of 29 September, VELTRAIL had only run on a Mac and in an Android emulator. At 20:52 a signed development build — 101 MB — was installed on an iPhone 17 Pro Max with iOS 27, and it started. Two days after the first line of code, the game was on a phone.
A phone is not a small computer. A thumb replaces the mouse, the screen has rounded corners and a camera cut-out to keep buttons away from, and the processor shares its power budget with the battery. From that evening on, much of the work was checked on this one device.
120 Hz
The next morning the game learned to run at 120 frames per second on screens that support it, with a 60 Hz option in the graphics settings for longer battery life.
The first measurements were a surprise: the night-time runs showed 60 Hz and a processor two to three times slower than expected. The reason turned out to be ordinary — the phone was almost certainly in Low Power Mode, which holds the screen at 60 Hz. On the morning of 3 October, in normal mode, a deliberately heavy stress scene held 120 frames per second, and 95 percent of frames were ready within 9.9 milliseconds.
- first launch on an iPhone
- 29 Sep, 20:52
- by default on high-refresh screens
- 120 Hz
- 95th-percentile frame time in the stress scene
- 9.9 ms
How the phone is tested
Most checks on the iPhone are automated runs inside the game. It plays matches and walks through its own screens with touches simulated inside the app, and it records frame times and screenshots along the way. The iPhone screenshots on this site come from such runs, and the couriers in them are driven by bots or by a scripted player.
That is not the same as a person holding the phone and playing. It is also just one phone — a fast, recent one. So when this journal says “tested”, it means tested on one device, and we will keep saying so until that changes.