Its iPad season, which means that in addition to device reviews and general commentary, we also get a return to the “hardware is great, software is lacking” iPad narrative.

Goodie.

iPadOS is supposedly the achilles heel of the product line. Its limited. Restricted. Crippled. A toy.

Yes, there is a problem with software on the iPad, but its not iPadOS.

It’s The Apps

So many of the complaints I see fall into two categories:

• Quality of Apps – Microsoft Office is a big offender here, but I see a fair amount of mentions of Adobe’s apps as well. Even Apple’s Pro apps, Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro, aren’t immune from this criticism. These apps do not have all of the capabilities of their laptop counterparts. This is 100% true. The question is….is that because of iPadOS limitations or simply because the developers choose not to invest more in these versions? In the Microsoft case, its very easy to argue that its maybe not in their best interest to make the iPad version of Office too good, in order to protect Surface sales. That doesn’t sound like Satya Nadella’s Microsoft, but I wouldn’t put it past them.
  iPadOS isn’t perfect by any means, but Apple has made a number of improvements over the past few years to both the general experience, and the capabilities available to developers.
  
  iPadOS 15 – Improved multitasking
  iPadOS 16 – Stage Manager, external display support, apps can request up to 16 GB of RAM, Virtual Memory swap
  iPadOS 17 – External camera support

A past bottleneck for more advanced apps on iPad was the relatively low amounts of RAM compared to laptops. In addition, apps could only count on having access to up to 5 GB of RAM regardless of how much RAM the device had. Both of those issues were addressed in iPadOS 16, but are any apps actually using these increased capabilities? And if they aren’t, again, how is that an iPadOS problem versus a developer adoption problem?

• Lack of specific apps – Software is ultimately what makes any computer useful. If the platform you’re using doesn’t have the as you need, then its not the right platform for you. This is the case for iPadOS. But its also the case for Windows, macOS, or Linux. Or ChromeOS. Or any platform. I don’t see how this is the fault of iPadOS. If the apps I need for my job on run on Windows, does that make macOS a “toy os”? That doesn’t make sense. That’s just how different platforms work.

The bottom line: Developers need to be encouraged to take advantage of the capabilities iPadOS has TODAY.

Think About the Hardware

Apple offers a pretty wide range of iPad hardware. The iPad that sells the most is the base model, which today would be the iPad 10. This iPad comes with 4GB of ram, but the base models from the past few years have come with as little as 2 GB of ram. On the higher end, an iPad Pro can come with as much as 16 GB of ram. In general, apps are expected to scale across the entire line. Which means if I’m building an enhanced Pro app, like Photoshop, I have to figure out how to make this work with a computer with only 2 GB of ram. This isn’t really as much of a problem with laptops where 8 GB of ram is more standard even on lower end machines.

Is it impossible for an app to scale that widely? No, but its a lot of work, and I could easily see a company deciding its not worth the effort.

But again, that’s not a fault of iPadOS per se , but more of Apple’s product decisions.

Its worth noting that we are starting to see a small number of apps, like Final Cut and Octane X, only run on M-Series devices. I don’t think this is what Apple wants in the long term. The Mac certainly doesn’t work that way, but perhaps its what iPadOS needs right now to enable more Pro app development.

Apple Is Not Blameless

The past few years of iPadOS updates have added some great features, like the ones mentioned above, that improve the overall user experience and allow developers to build better apps.

These were all great updates, but I’d argue they were years later than they should have been. And now there is a large swath of existing apps that aren’t, and probably won’t ever be, updated to support these features. Which means users are stuck with apps that don’t support multi-window. Or apps that make copies of files instead of opening them in place.

Again, not an iPadOS issue, but it is the reality of where the platform is today.

A lot of the big gaps have been filled, but there are still some needed improvements. The inability of multiple apps to use the microphone at the same time makes podcasting difficult for many. iPadOS also remains intentionally unfriendly to the idea of long running background tasks, which is why apps like Final Cut require you to leave the app open while its exporting your video.

Conclusion

I hope Apple continues to improve iPadOS, but at the end of the day, if developers aren’t building apps that take advantage of capabilities of iPad hardware or software, that’s NOT an iPadOS issue. iPadOS isn’t perfect, but its actually way more capable than its given credit for.