You have a pretty, functional, successful iPhone app already in the App Store. Then out comes the iPhone 5 with its new dimensions and retina display. What kind of changes will you need to make to accommodate these new features? Darrell Etherington over at TechCrunch asked two “developers of varying technical expertise and experience” that question. Here’s a sneak peek at what he came up with.

Milen Dzhumerov, developer of Clear:

The amount of work depends solely on whether the interface in question is inherently stretchable. For example, a lot of applications are size-constrained thus they employ scrollviews. For those types of applications, supporting the new screen should be a matter of removing assumptions in any layout code about the screen height.

Goncalo Catarino, founder of Weddar:

In the Report screen where we use a .xib view I use a new “Auto Layout” feature Xcode has, and just define the constraints for the objects’ relative positioning on the screen depending on the device it’s working on.

Get their full thoughts at TechCrunch >>>

These two developers don’t seem to think the new changes will present too much of an issue. Etherington muses that developers will take it easy this time around and just make sure their apps look good. After that they can spend time on customizing the app for the increased screen space.

What do you think? Will the new iPhone 5 features be easy for developers to handle?

(If you don’t have time to retool and retest your app, don’t worry. Existing apps will work just fine on the new iPhone, they just don’t be able to take advantage of up upgrade graphics or extra screen space.)