Yesterday was a big day for all iDevices enthusiasts, since Apple announced the details of its awaited new revision of the iPhone OS: iPhone OS4.0.  Is this good or bad news? Well good news of course, especially for users who finally will receive some of the most sought after functionalities such as folders and multitasking.

Now, from a pure gaming perspective, the Game Center is clearly the most exciting addition to the new iPhone OS. Although independent services such as Open Feint were doing a good job in this area, users can finally have a centralised social gaming network a la PSN or Xbox Live without worrying about the fragmentation of their achievements, username or gaming score. With the introduction of the iPad, this is definitely the right direction to take if Apple wants to consolidate their devices as serious and competitive gaming platforms (if there’s still somebody who argue it, at least). * Nintendo could take note of it*

From the developer point of view we are also quite excited about the GameCenter, since an integrated system will be much easier to work with than using third-party solutions and all users will have access to it. But, as always, there’s something that bugs us: compatibility. According to Apple, iPhone OS 4.0 won’t be available for 1st and 2nd generation iPhones and 1st generation iTouch and only some functionalities will work under iPhone 3G and 2nd generation iTouch. D’oh!

As we talked about earlier, reaching the widest audience possible is one of our main concerns and user segmentation is very much an inconvenient, especially considering the wild amount of older iPhones and iTouch users out there. Until now a compatibility issue could be solved by a simple firmware update, but with 4.0 that can become a hardware upgrading problem. We have yet to see how will this cases be treated, since a backwards-compatible prepared app could easily solve this issue by rendering unusable the OS 4.0-specific options, but, unfortunatelly, this hasn’t been the case with older updates.

Should we ignore Game Center then? I don’t think we can afford that… so should we create 2 versions of each game? I wonder if Apple will be OK with that.

Last, but not least, everything stated above is assuming that the Game Center will be a service free of charge both for users and developers, but that is, for the moment, merely an assumption.

So, it’s great that iPhone OS 4.0 will be ready soon, Great! But… let’s wait and see how it all turns out.

by David | Posted in Development, General