If you believe the rumor mill, Apple is planning on releasing a larger iPhone later this year. Yes, yes, we've heard the bigger iPhone reports before, but the latest batch adds considerable credence to the idea that Apple will finally enter the big-screen waters.

Even though the company has repeatedly stated that it is happy with the size of the current iPhone, as my friend Rene Ritchie likes to say, with Apple, you can never say never.

The central challenge that Apple has with moving to a bigger phone is that the larger screen could be problematic for the hundreds of thousands of iOS developers who work on the platform. If we accept the idea that Apple needs a larger-screen phone (and I think it does), what does that mean for developers and app designers?

When Apple moved to Retina screens for the iPhone 4 — and then to a longer screen for the iPhone 5 — developers had to rejigger their apps to work accordingly. Would a larger iPhone add one more level of frustration and pain?

To find out, I asked a bunch of iOS designers and developers what impact a larger iPhone would have on their workflows. The answers I got back were surprising — both in their similarity, and in their acceptance of a larger phone as an inevitability.

Developers Already Prepared
"Honestly, Apple has been preparing developers for this for two years," said Brooklyn College student and iOS developer Moshe Berman. Berman started developing iOS apps about three and a half years ago and cites the introduction of auto-layout in Xcode (alongside the iPhone 5) as one of the ways Apple has given developers tools to make apps flow more easily to different screen sizes.

Although Berman says the auto-layout tools have had growing pains, he notes that they have "matured a lot since iOS 7's release and [they are] something that developers will have to get used to if they haven't yet. For me, I'll have to go back and tweak about 15-20 of my apps, but it won't be complicated, just tedious."

Likewise, Dave Wiskus, partner and lead designer at Q Branch, the company behind the notes app Vesper, says most iOS developers have already updated their graphics workflows to work in vector, rather than pure bitmap.

The biggest difference between the way iOS and Android apps are built — from a graphics point of view — is that iOS apps use bitmap images. These can look more precise, but can't scale to other screen sizes. This is why iOS developers need to build Retina assets, non-Retina assets and assets in different screen lengths for any iPhone app that still supports the iPhone 3GS.

"Hopefully everyone learned from the Retina changeover and their documents are all built in vectors," "Hopefully everyone learned from the Retina changeover and their documents are all built in vectors," he says.

On Android, the graphics files are vector based, which means they can scale within the OS to fill the size of the screen.

That said, general best practices encourage iOS designers to move to a vector-based workflow, if only to make it easier to scale an asset to a different resolution (such as Retina) or for a different screen format (such as the iPad).

"The smart designers caught on early and switched to Photoshop's vector tools," Wiskus says. "With vector tools, smart objects, and modern layer styles and smart filters, there's absolutely no excuse to be working in bitmaps."

It All Depends on Screen Resolution
For most of the iOS designers and developers that I spoke with, the biggest concern wasn't the size of the screen, but the resolution.

Remember, the iPhone 4 and 4S have the same size screen as the original iPhone (and 3G/3GS), but the pixel density is doubled. Similarly, the iPad mini has the exact same resolution as the original iPad — but the screen is 7.9-inches rather than 9.7.

"When the iPad mini came out, everybody thought they'd need to redesign, but since it was the same resolution it turned out everything that worked well on the iPad worked on the mini," says Allen Pike, a former software engineer at Apple who now builds iOS apps at Steamclock Software.

This is true. Apple could just keep the current resolution of the iPhone 5S (1,136 x 640) and increase the size of the screen to 4.5 inches or 4.8 inches. Apps would scale accordingly — just as iPad apps work on the iPad and iPad mini.

The problem with that approach, however, is that the pixel density on the phone itself would be a big downgrade from what users have now. A 4.8-inch phone with a resolution of 1,136 x 640 has a pixel density of 272 pixels per inch (ppi). That might count as Retina if we're talking about a tablet (the iPad Air's pixel density is 264ppi), but it probably wouldn't fly for a phone. I've found that unless you get into the true "phablet" size of 5.5 inches or more, most users still tend to use their phone at the same distance from their face.

And even though Apple isn't a company that outwardly worries about how its specs compare to others, it wouldn't necessarily look great to have a 4.8-inch or 5-inch phone with lower pixel density than the old product and something that pales in comparison to some of the super high-density phone displays on the market from HTC, Samsung and Sony.

Apple could increase resolution to 3x of the original iPhone. Apple could increase resolution to 3x of the original iPhone. Taking into account the new aspect ratio that's been in place since the iPhone 5, that would mean a resolution of 1,704 x 960. On a 4.8-inch screen, that translates to almost 408ppi. That's quite high — even higher than current iPhones.

Apple could also continue in the "doubling" game and move to a 4x pixel density — meaning a resolution of 2,272 x 1,280. On a 4.8-inch screen, that's a jaw-dropping 543ppi. Even at 5 inches, the pixel density is still 522ppi — making it truly "resolutionary."

For most of the designers and developers I spoke with, the concern of a super-high resolution screen is the impact on battery life and graphics processors. As we've seen with the iPad mini With Retina, Apple has made some significant advancements in its graphics and battery tech.

The Question of Aspect Ratio
Most of the designers and developers I spoke with envisioned a larger iPhone sharing the same 16:9 aspect ratio as the iPhone 5 and iPhone 5S. An interesting point that a few brought up, however, would be a switch to a different aspect ratio — perhaps returning to the 3:2 aspect ratio of the original iPhone (shared by the 3G, 3GS, and 4S).

That could allow Apple to simply increase the width of the phone, rather than the width and the height. Similar to the shift from the iPhone 4S to iPhone 5, a move to a resolution such as 1,920 x 1,280 (double the resolution of the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S), would give more screen real-estate without necessarily sending pixel densities into battery-defying stratospheres.

Stefano, an independent iOS developer and designer for Redfishmood, would like to see Apple consider a return to 3:2 for phones.

"A wider iPhone with a 3:2 aspect ratio, something like the iPhone 4 but with a bigger screen and more pixels wouldn't have a big impact on my work," he says.

The Question of Fragmentation
One of the reasons many developers and designers I speak with prefer developing for iOS as opposed to Android is the issue of device fragmentation. Scaling to different screen sizes might be easier on Android, but many developers worry about having to test against lots of different chipsets and OS versions.

What's interesting is that although many of the developers and designers I spoke with did mention that a different screen resolution (or aspect ratio) would add additional work, few seemed to see it as a deal-breaker.

For Joseph Cieplinski, Creative Director at Bombing Brain Interactive, a new screen size would be a hassle but not the end of the world.

"We're nowhere near Android territory here," "We're nowhere near Android territory here," he notes but adds that a new screen size "would mean that it would be just that much harder to make a good iPhone app."

"There's a point where too many screen sizes would lead most developers down the path of designing the way web designers do, a 'one-size stretches to all' approach, which would be shame, really. Because pixel-perfect layout is one of the things that sets iOS apart from other mobile systems. But one more size won't get us there quite yet."

Sebastiaan de With is the Chief Creative Officer at doubleTwist (a company that largely focuses on the Android ecosystem) and has previously worked on design at Apple. He says that while he has mixed feelings about seeing the iOS app design space become more like Android, "where you have to test in more places and have far more targets to design for," he's also very excited.

"No community but the iOS development and design community makes tools for their creation process so quickly. It'll be no time at all until we see some really cool processes, techniques and tools for creating fantastic apps that target a diverse set of screen sizes and resolutions."