Do iphone apps in development run more slowly than once they are released?

Question

I am new to developing iPhone apps and have been testing on on the simulator and on my 2nd gen iPod. I am seeing lag times in what I believe is simple code. I know that the simulator will always run faster than the hardware, and I know that when I'm debugging, that the physical iPod has to run the debugging program in the background which could affect performance. My question is that after debugging, when I run the app on my iPod, it still seems sluggish. My program is in the beginning stages and is pretty small, only about 1000 lines of code and I know I release all of the objects I create. The program is a bit sluggish from the start so I don't think it's a memory leak issue.

Do apps that are in development generally runs slower than once they are finalized and released or is what I am working with now the general speed of the app that will be released to the public? Any insight would be appreciated. Thank you for your time.

Answer 1

It is pretty much the same. You can do things for production like turning off NSLogs and other optimizations, but you probably won't see a human-measurable difference.

Answer 2

Well, the optimized "Release" build configuration obviously runs faster than the "Debug" build style. The difference can be very big if your code does a lot of computation. If you are only doing UI stuff, you'll probably see no difference.

There’s no difference between the Release build on your developer machine and the app you get from the store.

Answer 3

As others have said, the optimized "Release" build on a device will run at exactly the same speed as when it is released.

Use Instruments to profile your application and see exactly what is causing the slowdown.