Is it possible to develop for the iPhone without a

Question

I know there are emulators, but is this good enough? If someone is serious about iPhone development, do they absolutely need an iPhone?

Answer 1

Necessary. If you plan to develop a successful product it needs to be one the end users (not just the developers) find easy to use.

The best way to do that would be to load your app on an iPhone then take it to various people and ask them to use it while you watch them to see if they experience any issues. Users can get mighty creative in trying to do things a developer never intended - just ask any support tech.

Unless you're app is going to sell for less then $500 total it's a relatively small investment to build a quality app.

Answer 2

I've tried iPhoney and compared to my iPhone (Mark 1) it's not the same, it's close - but not close enough to rely on if the interface is of importance to you.

Answer 3

If you need to learn Obj-C, go with the emulator for a while until you learn the ropes and save the expense for later. But yes, eventually you will need an iPhone for final testing. How long you can wait will depend on the features that your app uses, If all you are doing is button presses, you can wait a long time. If you are dragging, using location services, etc., you'll need a device earlier in the development cycle.

Answer 4

If you are serious about development, an iPhone (or iPod touch) is a must. However, the official SDK comes with a very complete "iPhone simulator". This will allow you getting a feel for Objective C and the entire development workflow. The SDK requires Leopard.

You don't need a Mac for this. You can use OSX86 on your PC, either installed on and booted from disk or through VmWare.

It works. In fact, you can even synch the iPhone through Leopard running in vmWare.

Now, testing on a real iPhone is a necessity because of performance, memory usage etc. Also you need it for the entire authentification procedure, getting the keys etc. (if you want to sell your stuff on the Appstore), testing this really requires an iPhone.

Answer 5

You absolutely need the real device. The performance difference between the simulator and the actual iPhone/iPod Touch hardware is huge. Code that will run nice and fast in the simulator can easily turn out to be too slow to be usable on the real thing. Also the API provided by the simulator is not 100% identical to the real thing, so code that works fine in the sim, may not work on the device. The only way to know for sure is to test often on the actual device.

As others have mentioned, the iPod touch works well as a development device. So if you don't need any of the features of the iPhone, it's a good, cheaper, alternative.

Answer 6

if you are going to develop native apps for the iphone, I would say get an iphone or ipod touch to target. emulators are good, but eventually you will need to target the real thing. if you are developing web specific content there are lots of things you can do without it (there are some great dev videos free from apples dev site which will only cost you a sign up) but eventually I would think you would still want to test with the real deal