More often than not, iPad applications share a significant part of their codebase with their iPhone equivalent. As an editor, should we prefer publishing a dedicated application for each platform, or a universal one?

Advantages of a universal app

• With iCloud and its over-the-air automatic synchronization between all our iOS devices, users won’t have your application twice on their iPads.

• By merging the you minimize the number of app submissions, a difficult moment in which mistakes can easily be made.

Risks of a universal app

• By spliting apps you won’t annoy users from a specific platform with upgrades that do not concern them.

Other leads

• Leveraging iPhone downloads to rise in the iPad App Store rankings doesn’t seem to be possible ¹. Whatever the method being used by Apple, that’s not a good reason to prefer a solution over the other.

• Finally, in terms of earnings, it is rather difficult to make a universal app much more expensive because many users will only use it on a single device. Therefore most people price their universal application as if it was an iPhone-only one (this might lead to a slight loss of earnings though as iPad apps are traditionnaly more expensive).

In the end, both choices seem reasonable : two separate apps will offer more flexibilty in pricing and upgrades, whereas a universal one will be more simple. One should be rather careful when making his decision though, as there’s no coming back.

¹ Cross Fingers, today #4 on the iPhone App Store is only #21 in the iPad one, far behind iPad-only applications.

² Because of the way the App Store works, migrating from two separate apps to a universal one (or the other way round) will indeed break the “update link” with your users. Worse : in the case of a paid application, they would have to pay again.