Bitmaps take a lot of space and with Retina display apps going over 5x the size of previous apps, should developers look at Vector graphics when developing their apps especially high graphics apps?
Now it's time for someone to come along and say that I don't know what I'm talking about and this whole post is moot (or makes me looks dumb).....
GrindedDown is right. It would be OK for some basic shapes / UI elements to be vector-based, but complex graphics are too much of a load for the CPU.
I can't imagine having to load tens of icons that look like this:
every time you hit your home button. The iPad would probably become unresponsive / laggy for a couple seconds and drain battery like crazy.
Quick example of the kind of issues you'd get: Earlier I made a simple button, to be shown above a live camera view. It's just a white button, with a simple shape, and a transparent background. I made it with vectors so it's easy to make retina/standard versions. But it's white, and when it's shown over a white background it becomes invisible - so I add a slight drop shadow to make it visible. Drop shadows are very hard to render with vectors. The only options are to save it as a bitmap, or to remove the drop shadow and add a black outline instead - which doesn't look anywhere near as good.
I saw this thread and was reminded of this. Boy those were fun!