| HappySqurriel said: Now, the demographic problems will (start to) go away as devices like the iPhone and iPod touch come down in price but then the secondary problem comes into play ... As time goes on competitive devices in the phone/MP3 player market are gaining support because they offer a similar feature set at a more competitive price, and 2 to 3 year old iPods/iPhones have very different capabilities/featuresets, which results in a very small set of devices with uniform capabilities. As a developer you really don't want to be working on developing a product where you have to target dozens of user-interface variations and dozens of hardware architectures when there is a single device that has a similar userbase.
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The issues you raise are real, and I've been wondering how Apple plans to develop the iPhone platform further without breaking compatibility with previous versions of hardware. Obviously, the switch from iPhone 2G to 3G was a big change, but very carefully planned and engineered so that the 3G does not in fact offer additional functionality, only improved functionality. From a developer perspective this is a key issue: the APIs stay relatively constant, and you get better performance from network data transfer and location services. IMO it is clear that Apple is very aware of the issue of platform fragmentation that is very characteristic of cell phones, and they are working very hard to minimize it. iTouch doesn't have a built-in microphone, only has wi-fi, doesn't have a camera and doesn't have GPS. It may not sound much, and from a gaming pespective it may not be much, but for other apps the difference is very real. However, one aspect that is perhaps the most important regarding gaming is the screen resolution, and I don't honestly see Apple changing that anytime soon, simply because 480 x 320 is quite enough for a 3.5" screen. That, coupled with a baseline performance level that is very good for a cell phone, means that devs don't have to make big sacrifices to stay backwards compatible even if Apple decides to up the processor, memory and/or graphics chip.
