Developing apps for the iPad using the simulator is great. Assuming you have a decent Mac development environment the simulator is super fast and has seemingly unlimited amounts of memory. What more could you ask for?
Actually it would be much better if the simulator environment was closer to the device when it comes to speed and memory limitations. Especially memory.
Apple has never published how much RAM memory there is in any of the iPhone or iPod Touch devices in the past. And of course no such details are available for the iPad. You might assume that for a larger device there would be more memory available. Guess again.
The gorgeous 768 x 1024 display is begging to be filled with full screen images. Keep in mind that an image of that size will take up approximately 3 MB of precious memory. Keep 10-15 of them around in memory and you’re half-way to getting your app terminated because of memory usage.
Today is the last day to submit iPad apps for consideration for the new iPad App Store. I predict that we’ll see quite a few apps crashing on opening day because developers have not been able to test their app’s memory usage on an actual device with real world memory limitations.
April 1st, 2010 at 09:45
Wouldn’t one assume that the iStore approval process would test the app on a real iPad and if it crashed not release it to the store?
April 1st, 2010 at 10:49
@Michael: Yes, if the app crashes during the approval testing then it will definitely be rejected. But given the limited time each tester spends with an app, it’s likely that they will miss some issues. This is especially true for memory usage which has a tendency to rear its ugly head only after extensive use of the app.
April 1st, 2010 at 18:39
Nick, I saw a screen shot for an app for the iPad that shows all the stats like those for the iPhone. The RAM section showed somewhere around 3800MB’s of RAM total for execution. At least that’s what I assumed it was for since there was another section of RAM that showed 32GB’s of space total.
I can’t say for sure if 3.5GB’s of RAM is available for execution, but considering the size of the screen (as you said) and such. I would have to assume that there was more memory to work with on the iPad.
April 1st, 2010 at 19:24
@Dave: That screenshot was probably from the app running in the iPad simulator. In the simulator environment having 3.5 GB of RAM available seems about right.
April 3rd, 2010 at 08:29
Ah, your probably right. 🙁 That’s depressing now. I was really hoping that Apple pulled out all the stops for the iPad.
Hopefully it has at least as much as the iPhone 3GS has. However, I would think that Apple would up the hardware to 1GB or something. As you say, it really needs a bunch since it’s wielding a 1024×768 pixel screen.