Okay that makes sense in a slightly strange way, the reality is if everything was just scaled for the large screen nobody will really notice that a button is bigger on the 4.7 or 5.5" screen, like how is done on most Android devices.
I get the way how you are thinking, but this is incorrect. iOS works entirely different here than Android. If everything was just scaled, than on the 4.7" iPhone everything would be 1.2X bigger (so app icons, text, etc. would look about as big as they do on an iPad Air) - that's still acceptable. On a 5.5" display, however, everything would be 1.4X bigger - app icons, text, etc. would look significantly bigger than they do on the current iPhone 5S and quite a lot bigger than they do on the iPad Air.
Most developers will not make use of the extra screen real estate due to it requiring a totally new set of UX and UI designs for 3 different phones and possibly a lot of extra code to support these, most likely developers will either make everything proportionally bigger or just add more whitespace, the side effect of the proportion is this causes 4 different resolution set of assets to be included and the extra download/storage costs of these for devices which they aren't required. For example:
Non Retina - 50 x 50
Retina - 100 x 100
4.7" - 117 x 117 (rounded down from 117.18 x 117.18)
5.5" - 129 x 129 (rounded down from 129.37 x 129.37)
Using this logic you've probably at a minimum trebled the size of the asset catalog in your app.
Again, if the rumoured resolutions are true, this is not true - image assets will remain the same. This is what it would look like:
Non-Retina (iPhone 2G, 3G, 3GS) - 50 x 50
Retina [2X] (iPhone 4, 4S, 5, 5C, 5S,
i6 4.7") - 100 x 100
Retina [3X] (
i6 5.5") - 150 x 150
So, yes, apps will be slightly bigger in MB size... but... the 50 x 50 one will be dropped (as non-retina iPhones are not supported by iOS 8).
Developers will either do two things:
- Do a bit of work so apps make optimal use of the screen (e.g. what developers did when the iPhone 5 came out)
- Do nothing (e.g. the apps on iPhone 5 with black bars on the top and bottom)
The reworking won't be that big of an issue: with iOS 8, Apple is heavily pushing for apps to be resolution independent - if developers do that, they won't have to care about the three different displays (4", 4.7" and 5.5").
Additionally, developers will have to supply image assets for the [3X] Retina resolution. If they don't do this, than apps will simply look a bit more pixelated (e.g. like iPhone 3GS apps running on an iPhone 4).
Obviously this also results in an usual set of rounding challenges when scaling from a standard size of 320pt. This carries onto the web, which again currently most screens are designed at 320pt width and scaled accordingly for both Android and iOS and the number of mobile websites which don't provide retina quality assets is already annoying me a lot (BBC New for one).
If auto layout is the answer at present some of us still need to support iOS5, and auto layout makes animations (especially complex ones) quite difficult. Thats not saying that Apple won't have a magic bullet to solve all of this on the 9th of course.
This won't be an issue. The suggested resolutions require very little work by developers.
Try to look at it like this:
Remember when the iPhone 4 came out? All developers had to do was supply the app with higher resolution images.
Remember when the iPhone 5 came out? Developers had to deal with some extra pixels in height (e.g. more space for content).
This time, with the iPhone 6, Apple is doing both at the same time: adding more pixels in height (and width) for extra content - and on the 5.5" model, they are increasing the 'Retina factor' to [3X] (instead of the current [2X]).
History has shown us that some apps will remain unoptimized, but the majority of the apps will be updated and the work developers have to go through is not that much.
One could argue that developers should do no work at all, but let's be honest here: these resolutions can provide an even better user experience and developers have to do very little work while potentially tens - if not hundreds - of millions of iPhone 6 devices will be sold within a year. So little work, yet a very big market for developers.
So, in conclusion, and I don't want to repeat myself, but: Gruber's suggested resolutions make
a lot of sense.