Submitting an iOS game, viewport is completely wrong for App Store reviewer but fine on all of our devices

Question

I have a game we're trying to release in the app store for iphone and ipad, and while it works fine on all of our devices (a handful of iphones and ipads), when the app store reviewers try it the actual viewport they see is highly cropped and distorted.

This is an example options screen that the reviewer saw:

This is what that options screen looks like for us on an equivalent aspect ratio/resolution:

As you can see, it's just a small, off-centered square for them, surrounded by black. But we've tested this on devices like an old iphone 5 up to big ipads and have never seen anything like this, the game takes up the full screen and the aspect ratio is correct and not distorted or stretched.

One important detail is this is entirely an OpenGL and SDL program, not using any Apple UI frameworks at all. The render size is determined by SDL_GetRendererOutputSize(), which then is used in glViewport(), and the window is created with the SDL_WINDOW_ALLOW_HIGHDPI flag. This so far has seemed to work with both retina and non-retina physical devices.

Also all of the screenshots they've given us look the same, same little square viewport surrounded by black, so I originally thought they were cropping them on purpose to highlight specific components of the screen, but this appears to be just exactly how it looks for them as this square is in the same position in each screenshot. I've asked them for more information on their devices but they wouldn't tell me.

We also have the program set to only ever use landscape, not portrait, but the weird thing is that with the way our UI reflows, the only way to get that button to look squished the way it does there is if the game was somehow still rendering in portrait, as seen this example shot I took by forcing it to run in a very tall portrait window:

I don't even know where to begin to try to figure out what's going wrong for them though, because as I've said, everything looks fine when running in an emulator and everything looks fine when we've run it on several physical devices. Is there some build or release configuration I could be missing? Some OpenGL setting I should check? I'm just hoping this problem looks similar to something someone else has encountered before.

Answer 1

To follow up with the solution that worked for me, I noticed that in my project's General settings in Xcode, under Deployment Info, I had only checked iPhone and not iPad. What I've since learned is that without that checkbox, some iPads will have to run in an emulation mode, which may have been the source of our problem. Deploying a new build with that checked (as well as "requires full screen"), it rendered exactly the same on our own iPads, but the app was subsequently approved with no further problems. I had made no other changes to the program, so my assumption is that that setting likely fixed it.