Maybe they don't need to. A terminal app with a busybox-like set of tools within the sandbox would make iOS/iPadOS a lot nicer to us nerds. We already have Files.app. A terminal can't be that far.

Terminus is available now and works well enough. It’s not a shell into local iOS, but that’s fine for me. and standard external USB keyboards work fine with a $10 Lightning adapter.

https://termius.com/ios

Yeah, but that's just an SSH access point. I want a full shell.

A busybox-like set of tools would not be very useful without a package manager and the ability to install arbitrary software like compilers, editors, and the like. Just out of curiosity, I counted how many formulae I have installed with homebrew on my Mac:

    $ brew list | wc -w
    244

That's probably not that many compared to some people out there.

iSH is reasonably popular and is ripe for Apple to either Sherlock them or bless them by allowing them on the app store https://ish.app

edit: "but iSH is Linux, surely Apple would do Darwin!" you say. By looking at how poorly they're maintaining the command line experience on the Mac (deprecating their bundled Python, Ruby, not updating anything GNU GPLv3 etc), it's easy to imagine them happy to outsource that drudgery to the Linux community, like Microsoft is with WSL. Add to that all the web developers telling them they want a deploy-ready environment...

My problem with iSH is that it's x86 emulated. On a battery contrained device.

Hire the guy and do it natively in house.

Presumably not least the Apple engineering department themselves!

This is actually an interesting question for any company that makes operating systems.

* I'm sure Microsoft's Windows developers all work on Windows.

* I assume Apple uses Macs for all development right now.

* If memory serves, Google uses a lot of Macs themselves, but did at least make an effort to make it possible to do development on Chromebooks.

* Oracle... it's not clear to me that Oracle actually has anybody working on Solaris, but if they do then they have to use Solaris to work on Solaris unless they've managed to completely overhaul the build system. For everything else, OEL should at least theoretically be completely adequate.

* I'd be interested to know what IBM uses internally; AIX was a workstation OS but I have no idea if they've maintained that capability, and they own RH now so that's an option if they wanted to stay "in-house"

* I don't have any specific knowledge about it, but Red Hat absolutely could use Fedora and/or RHEL for most everything.

* Canonical is almost certainly running Ubuntu everywhere.

I don’t know about Canonical but certainly a few years ago I was seeing Windows created documents out of Red Hat.

> Maybe Apple, like the Soviet Union, doesn't have it all figured out?

I wish I had a super-like for this answer.

cough There's a fair few of us - yes, even in R&D, that feel equally strongly supportive of Terminal.app, vi, and command-line tools.

And as someone on the inside, who knows the answer to this story (nope, not telling) it's interesting to read the conjecture :)