As a mobile dev for games/apps I like to have as many versions of devices as possible, newest one if possible. However, the older phones/tablets/devices are be

As a mobile dev for games/apps I like to have as many versions of devices as possible, newest one if possible. However, the older phones/tablets/devices are best to start and do most of the development on, somewhat like making sure a game runs on an older PC or laptop. If you tune your app to the lower end (older) devices, scaling up is easier than scaling down. If all you have is the latest devices it will lead to bloated apps and slow games. Similar to how John Carmack does parallel implementations and starts with the lower end renderers in game engine design [1]. > However, some of my most effective uses of this strategy have been more aggressive. Over the years, I have done a number of hardware acceleration conversions from software rendering engines. In the old days, I would basically start from scratch, first implementing the environment rendering, then the characters, then the special effects. There were always lots of little features that got forgotten, and comparing against the original meant playing through the game on two systems at once. > The last two times I did this, I got the software rendering code running on the new platform first, so everything could be tested out at low frame rates, then implemented the hardware accelerated version in parallel, setting things up so you could instantly switch between the two at any time. For a mobile OpenGL ES application being developed on a windows simulator, I opened a completely separate window for the accelerated view, letting me see it simultaneously with the original software implementation. This was a very significant development win. [1] http://sevangelatos.com/john-carmack-on-parallel-implementations/ http://sevangelatos.com/john-carmack-on-parallel-implementat...