Where are Apple's universal iPhone/iPad apps?
Apple's Find my iPhone is a universal binary that's optimized for both iPhone and iPad. Looking at Apple's other App Store apps, as indicated by the + icon, Find my iPhone is also the only Apple app that's a universal binary. Apple's iPhone apps, Apple Store (released just a few days ago), MobileMe Gallery, MobileMe iDisk, Keynote Remote, Remote (for Apple TV/iTunes), Texas Hold'em will all run on the iPad in 1x or 2x mode, but they don't look great. Apple's iPad apps, Numbers, Keynote, Pages, and iBooks won't run on iPhone.
Apple has announced iBooks is coming to iPhone with iOS 4 but it hasn't been released yet. Neither has iOS 4. That's coming Monday, June 21. That's probably when iBooks is coming as well, by way of popup notification when you launch the new iOS for the first time -- just like with iPad.
Another Apple app, iMovie, is coming with the iPhone 4, but exclusively to that device as it needs not only iOS 4, but the Apple A4 chip and reportedly the 512MB of RAM unique to the iPhone 4.
But what about those aforementioned non-universal binary apps? Lots of you want to use an optimized version of Remote to control your iTunes and Apple TV on the iPad, or MobileMe Gallery to access your online images, or iDisk to get at your files and media.You keep telling TiPb as much.
Maybe they're coming with iOS 4 as well. I just hope it isn't iOS 4 for iPad, due this fall. I'd like to use them between now and then...
Editor-in-Chief of iMore, Executive Producer at Mobile Nations, co-host of Iterate and ZEN and TECH, cook, grappler, photon wrangler.
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I too am disappointed in the amount of universal iPad apps. I get tired of running things in 2X mode. They just don't look nice. And I also don't understand the pricing of iPad apps verse iPhone apps. Why should the iPad version be $10 more just because I have a larger screen? It's the same code, just more pixels.
Apple is not alone however, far too many developers are ignoring the iPad and what's worse the ones who aren't are releasing separate iPad binaries forcing us to pay a second time for little more than a wide screen port. Accuweather, Ping, HandDBase, and Beejive are just a few of the ones I have had to purchase again.
And no MobileMe support or iMovie on the iPad? Major Apple fail!!! It's just what I feared, the iPad was intentionally crippled with 256mb so Apple could introduce a memory upgrade and move as new features in iPad 2. Not a happy apple customer here...
When they update the apps to run on iphone 4 the pixels shouldn't seem that bad because they will be closer to the ipads pixels right?
I can't believe the Apple Poker app hasn't been updated for iPad - it would be superb.
Gotta say the amount of iPad apps is really disappointing. For example - not one decent World Cup 2010 app is astonishing.
@Steve the ipad was not crippled at all because of it's 256mb of ram. Seriously?
I am also VERY disappointed in the lack of dev updating to universal binaries to be ipad friendly.
I spoke to one developer and he mentioned that converting to universal from a native iPhone app is a huge pain in the a$$, especially if the app has multiple screens like sub menus and buttons that take you to a completly different screen. He said it took him forever.
Does anyone including Rene know anything about this process? Is it really complex? I can't understand why more developers haven't followed this suit.. The ipad is obviously very successful to date.
As a developer, I can tell you that to make a worthwhile iPad app, there is more involved than just optimizing the graphics. The iPad has additional features and views that are not available on the iPhone which requires new and/or modified code to implement. I won't be working on iPad apps until the adoption rate is much higher (probably after Gen2 is released).
Apples simply too busy casting their cult of personality into thwarting flash and promoting HTML5. Who has time to do both? Not Apple. Their brand and technolgy is far too important to cross t's and dot i's when I come to their customer base.
This should help improve the situation:
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/06/13/iphone4appswillfillipadscreengetvga_output.html