Question posted in 
We are developing our first iPhone game, and all is going OK for now. We are testing on an iPhone 3GS and an iPad 1. We were wondering which devices should we test on to make sure that also people with older devices will be able to play the game and actually enjoy it.
I have been recommended to get an iPod Touch 2nd generation; since these do not come cheap, I wanted to ask more experienced people for their opinion. I have found a couple of these on eBay from respectable sellers; one is a jailbroken device with iOS 4, the other is a regular iPod Touch 2nd generation with iOS 3.
I looked through past topics on the same subject, and most recent one was about 1 year ago, so things might have changed. Thanks for your help!
4
Answers
If you’re checking on an iPhone 3GS then you probably don’t need an iPod Touch as well. Although it wouldn’t hurt as a secondary testing device.
I think either the iPad 2 or iPhone 4 would be good alternatives.. I know the iPhone 4 includes retina display so you’ll be working at 326dpi. Much higher resolution for graphics and UI elements than previous iPhone and iPod Touch generations.
If you plan on a Deployment Target for your apps lower than iOS 4.3, you will need to find an armv6 architecture device on which to test, preferably running the iOS version of the lowest version iOS Deployment Target which you plan on supporting. armv6 devices include the iPhone 2G, 3G and the 1st and 2nd gen iPod Touch.
The 3GS has a newer CPU that runs armv7, so that’s fine for Deployment Targets of 4.3 and above.
iOS devices fall into following categories for performance:
iPhone, iPhone 3G, iPod Touch 1G: 412MHz, 128MB RAM iPod Touch 2G: 533MHz, 128MB RAM iPhone 3GS, iPod Touch 3G: 600MHz, 256MB RAM iPod Touch 4G: 800MHz, 256MB RAM iPhone 4: 800MHz, 512MB RAM iPhone 4S: Dual-Core 800MHz, 512MB RAM iPad 1: 1GHz, 256MB RAM iPad 2: Dual-Core 1GHz, 512MB RAMFor more details, see this Wikipedia article.
It would probably be beneficial to have as many of these categories covered as possible, especially if you want enable/disable certain things to optimize graphics/performance for each device. At minimum, I would suggest getting a device in that first group so you can make sure your game can run on the least powerful hardware.
I would also suggest getting an iPhone 4 in order to have Retina Display graphics. Retina Display graphics are generally expected in new games these days, and although you could test it in the simulator, I would suggest having an iPhone 4 handy to test it on a real device as well.
It all depends on what version of iOS you are developing for.
In an ideal world, you would be able to test your product on all the devices that support the OS you are developing.
If this is not an option, you should just need the bare minimum devices that the OS can run on:
iOS 3: iPhone (original), iPod Touch (1st generation), iPad
iOS 4: iPhone 3G, iPod Touch (2nd generation), iPad
iOS 5: iPhone 3GS, iPod Touch (3rd generation), iPad
One can assume that if your product runs well on these devices, it will run well (if not better) on devices of greater power.