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While creating responsive layouts for mobile apps, we take into account WIDTH of screen, and create layouts for different WIDTHS, but why don't we consider HEIGHT?
If 2 devices have a lot of difference in HEIGHT, my app in one device will look drastically different from the one in other device. Doesn't responsive layout mean that my app should look the same in devices of all widths and heights?
Good UI design should consider height -- for example, it should avoid creating "false floors" and not make the user scroll for ages (unless they want to, such as with Twitter).
With users controlling the font size on their mobile devices, it's very challenging to force all content to fit into a certain width and height without the overall design breaking. Left-to-right scrolling has not only been shown to be undesirable, it's too close to swiping gestures on mobile. Vertical scrolling is acceptable for most users.
When we're talking about the interfaces, we're obliged to take into account the devices that makes us possible to display the content we aim to see. So that the main medium when the term responsivity was introduced was computer screens/displays and web through computers.
As you might imagine displays of all the computers/notebooks, the screens are rectangular on default and people using these displays intend to make browsers/applications minimized via reducing it's width rather than the height as it opens more broader and wider area.
Doesn't responsive layout mean that my app should look the same in devices of all widths and heights?
Well, it's just because in these days mostly people are mobile users and the term need to be updated as the term responsivity originally also covers the same issue. Or there might be attempts to describe the concept differentially as only mobile users ran into this seperation since web is mostly on rectangular screens.
If 2 devices have a lot of difference in HEIGHT, my app in one device will look drastically different from the one in other device
Besides you're totally correct and even it's the same for width for development point of view, it might mostly happening beacuse the heights are used %100 to fit all the screen sizes for mobile preferably. But that's not my main arguement and point to avoid using responsivity as a height on mobile or web eventually.
