Apple sent out an email this morning to all of the developers in the App Store giving them the green light on their iPad apps. It’s a very interesting move… most developers haven’t even seen an iPad and have only been able to test their apps in the iPad simulator. TUAW’s Erica Sadun presents an interesting point of view, explaining that “the simulator uses many Macintosh frameworks and libraries, offering features that are not actually present on the iPhone. Applications that appear to be completely operational and fully debugged on the simulator may flake out or crash on the device itself. You simply cannot fully debug any program solely by using the simulator and be assured that the software will run bug-free on the iPhone.”

We’ve recently heard that Apple shipped several key developers iPads but has a 10-page contract about its use, storage and other restrictions so that information doesn’t leak out. While that’s great for those developers, it’s really showing Apple’s lack of connection with everyone else. The iPad simulator is not perfect; even the current iPhone simulator has its issues… so what makes Apple think that releasing applications without testing them on hardware is a good thing?

Well, the review team will test the apps on hardware, and that makes it good enough. If you submit your app now, the review team will test it and hopefully approve it for the launch of the iPad App Store (we’re guessing April 3rd, obviously). Developers are at a huge disadvantage here. If the review team finds an error when the app is running on hardware, they’ll deny it and tell the developer to fix it and re-submit. That’s not going to work well… at all. First, the app could run just fine in the simulator. Second, how are you supposed to replicate a hardware error without hardware?

Do we really see an alternative? No. There have to be apps available on launch day, but we’re not too excited about running glitchy apps for the first couple of weeks while developers fix the unexpected errors.

Source 1 and Source 2