The iPad's chicken-or-egg developer problem

SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO--While the release of the iPhone 4 may have taken some of the wind out of Apple's iPad marketing sails, developers are still scrambling to produce apps for the new tablet device. One of the biggest problems to crop up though, is how much of a priority the iPad continues to be, versus creating something for the iPhone--or another platform first.

At first blush the reasoning behind this seems simple: there are just more iPhones and iPod Touches out there than the iPad can hope to approach in the next few years. Especially after this past weekend, where Apple announced that it sold 1.7 million iPhone 4s in just three days; that's compared to the 3 million iPads Apple sold after its first 80 days on the market. Any developer hoping to make a profit out of their first app knows full well there are more potential customers where there are more devices.

But there's more to the problem than size. It's that developing apps, and games in particular, for the iPad, is very different than it is on the iPhone. Not in the software or familiarity when coming from the iPhone, but in how the game ends up playing on a bigger screen. And to make the really great apps for either device does not always mean they'll port over well to either platform--at least according to developers and industry insiders at Monday's inaugural iPad Games Summit in South San Francisco.

Take for example Playfirst, the makers of the popular Diner Dash series. At the Summit, Playfirst's lead game designer Dana Nelson explained to the crowd that the company had had great ambitions of including complex, gesture-based minigames as part of one of its Dash iPhone games, but that in the end, the small-screen real estate proved to be a problem. When moving their Diner Dash title up to an iPad, Nelson explained that they tried out the mechanic again, and finally found a set of simple gestures and a "can't fail" game mechanic that worked. The only problem was that it couldn't be ported back over to the iPhone--at least not in a way that they've figured out yet.