twice upon a time

iPhone-to-iPad development: How’s the timing going to work out?

The problem, of course, is that before day one, we won’t have iPads ourselves for development and testing. This wasn’t a problem for iPhone development: by the time the SDK was released, we had all been using iPhones for many months. We knew how iPhone apps should look and behave, and we could test our apps on our iPhones during development for three months before anyone could sell apps to customers.

But we have very little guidance on how iPad apps should behave, and if we want our apps to be in the store at its launch, we have to do the majority of development without ever running our code on a real iPad (or even having used one).

This leaves a few possibilities for developers:

Develop the entire app without using a real iPad, submit the binary to Apple, and have it available on day one. But, having never run it on a real iPad, the app will probably have a lot of issues, and it will get panned in reviews for being buggy while you wait in the very long app-review queue for your updates.

Get an iPad on day one, rush home, test the app, iron out any little bugs or inopportune design choices, and submit it to Apple. This doesn’t really give much more of a testing and design advantage over option 1, and you’ll still be stuck waiting in the app-review queue for weeks as every other developer does the same thing.

Wait for initial app submission until after you’ve tested extensively on a real iPad. You’ll have the best release, but you will have missed the launch window, which could cost you dearly in revenue and market share. And even when you finally submit, the app-review queue will still be bogged down with people who took the first two options, delaying your presence even further.

Actually, there is a fourth possibility: a well-tuned webapp. It remains to be seen just how snappy the Safari browsing experience will be on the iPad, but I trust that the massive boosts in processor speed and memory from the iPhone to its larger sibling will not go to waste. That means that smartly written web applications, utilizing the full possibilities of HTML5 — canvases, database storage, etc — could end up being the best choice for users early in the iPad’s life.

That’s what I’m aiming for, anyway.

Source: marco