Larger iPhone Screen Shouldn’t Cause Many Problems, According To Developers

Even though the new iPhone will apparently be sporting a substantially larger screen, developers don’t believe the new model should cause many problems, according to GigaOm. Last week, The Wall Street Journal and Reuters each confirmed that the sixth-generation iPhone will look substantially different and have a screen that measurers “at least 4 inches diagonally.” To make a change from the standard 3.5-inch screen, Apple could follow a few routes. The new screen could simply be larger with a lower pixel density than the current Retina display. Or, Apple could change both the pixel density and 3:2 aspect ratio. One developer quoted by GigaOm, Sham Shank of Hotel Tonight, said he didn’t believe the aspect ratio or pixel density of the display would be changed.

“Changing the aspect ratio would be a lot of work for development teams. We found that maybe 50 percent of iOS development is [spent] in layout,” he said in an interview on Friday. “If we had to do two versions of that, the current aspect ratio and a new aspect ratio, and had to lay it out again, that would add considerably to our development time.”

And Larry Rachitsky, CEO of social discovery app LocalMind said he didn’t believe Apple would cause any Android-like fragmentation problems with different screen resolutions.

“We haven’t put a lot of thought into it yet, partly because we assume Apple isn’t going to pull an Android and fragment the device market unnecessarily. If they do, they must have a really good reason to do it, and we’re confident they’ll provide tools to make it easy to migrate. The last thing they want to do is put more friction in front of developers.”

Let’s hope Apple is able to satisfy the consumer demand for a bigger screen while making the transition easy for developers. Source: GigaOm