I can confirm for iOS that a read operation as per standard will occur first. Then if the server returns a completely filled PDU, the iOS device will then continue to perform the blob read operation. Tested with iPhone 7 running iOS 11.2.x
You do NOT need to call the peripheral.readValue(characteristic) multiple times for long attributes. CoreBluetooth does all of this under the covers.
Refer to the Bluetooth Spec Core v5.0, specifically Vol 3, Part F. "Long Attribute Values".
Experiment to prove above.
I have an Android Thing acting as the server that I'm making return the maximum length with my iPhone during a read operation. iOS and my RPI3 exchange a MTU of 185. So the read response is (MTU - 1) 184 bytes long. The server (RPI) then receives a new read request with an offset of 184, which you can then return more data. This is continued until the offset is > 512, or the last read response returns less than the MTU - 1 length.
Based upon the fact that the BluetoothGattServer supports long attributes, I'd assume the BluetoothGatt object does as well. Since there is no way via the API to set the offset to be read, I'd assume you can invoke read just once.