Porting Word Duelist & Thoughts on iPhone Dev

I've currently been working on porting my Xbox Live Indie Game Word Duelist to the iPhone (and potentially the Android). Here are some unfiltered thoughts while I've been going through the process:

1. UI implementation has more caveats on touch devices than it does with a controller. You have to worry about overlapping buttons, for instance, or what happens when a dialog should block out some UI elements but not others. There's nothing hard here, but there are details that need addressing.
2. Although it's a little daunting going from a memory managed language (C#) to one which isn't (C++ + Objective-C), a carefully coded framework can insulate you from most dynamic memory allocations. I have a lot of containers and low level framework code that ensures that my actual game contains naked dynamic allocation in only one place. Of course, the framework is doing a fair bit of allocation under the hood, but I don't ever see that.
3. You really can't make any assumptions about how the iPhone emulator runs compared to the device. Surprisingly, sometimes the emulator will actually run *slower* than the device even though the machine I'm using is considerably more powerful. Regular device testing is essential.
4. Regular device testing is imperative to suss out memory concerns. The iPhone runs out of memory a lot faster than you think. Even a simple Match 3 game can have memory concerns. An unfortunate reality of developing for the device, I'm afraid.
5. I really should have created a good texture atlasing system, because doing it by hand is a *pain.* Texture atlasing is pretty essential, because iPhone textures must be powers of two, but like I said above, you really have to watch your memory and thus conserve as much as you can. I've seen some decent greedy algorithms laying around that would honestly probably do a better job than my manual atlasing. Didn't have to worry about this with XBLIG.
6. Users really, really do not seem to like the "in-app upgrade to full version" model that was made available when in-app purchases were introduced for iPhone. Looking over the app store, I see a ton of comments accusing developers of false advertising because the game is labeled as "free" even though only a trial portion is actually free. The market seems to expect a Lite version in those instances. This is the reverse of XBLIG, where an upgradeable trial is a requirement.
7. The "Universal App" is non ideal. It unnecessarily bloats iPhone games. Same goes with retina support. There are better ways.
8. It's quite honestly shocking that I can use achievements & leaderboards on the iPhone and not on XBLIG - why is *Apple* paving the way for indies here? But at the same time, I do love the XBLIG avatar integration. Avatars would've been a good thing to add to the XBLIG version of this game that I just, well, didn't.
9. I don't like Objective-C or XCode. I'm not going to talk about why here, and I really have no interest in debating the points; XCode is a poor substitute for Visual Studio, and I find myself avoiding Objective-C and instead writing most of my game in C++ (which may not be great since XCode and the Instruments tools don't always play nice with C++). On the plus side, my inclination toward C++ will hopefully make porting to the Android - using the NDK - easier down the line.
10. I sure do hope ExEn gets funded so that I can use one language between several platforms. I already have a C# version of Word Duelist for XBLIG, but it's not mobile friendly and quite honestly the code base is a mess. The only way it will ever see WP7 is if Microsoft at some point provides a C++ path so I can take the much nicer mobile version and port it over. Wishful thinking.

That's all for now. The Word Duelist port is nearly finished - it has every feature the XBLIG version does (except sound right now), so I'm just spending my time polishing and putting in additions (ie: achievements). I expect in about a week's time I'll be able to put it up for review.

Let's hope it makes more than $12, which is what my last indie game has made in the app store. ^^