So I asked my wife how she liked her copy of my Good Nanny iphone application last night and she said: “It looks great.” Now, I’ve been doing this long enough to know that that means something isn’t right. After some cajoling she said it was running very slowly.

Not just a bit slower, but noticeably slower. My initial reaction was she needed to reboot her phone asap. I think everyone knows at this point that the iPhone occasionally needs to be rebooted and I had her do this. No difference. So this is very puzzling to me. After, some “brain time” (in my car sitting in traffic) another difference did occur to me: the Good Nanny copy on my iPhone 3G is a development copy, hers is a distribution copy.

The conventional wisdom, as I know it is that the difference between a dev build and a release build is that the release build runs faster however. This is going to drive me crazy, but I guess that is the part of software that separates the men from the boys:  improving performance.

Update:  On a iPod Touch there is no sluggishness at all.