> Arbitrary Swift code can run as evidenced by Swift Playgrounds.

Arbitrary Swift code which can only run because Apple grants themselves private entitlements that let it work.

There are a ton of great desktop quality apps on the iPad, I think the thing is that prosumer users don't know about them, and also people have been conditioned to think that any iOS app over $5 is expensive.

As one example, the music ecosystem is really good. There's Garageband and several great 3rd party DAWs, and a ton of apps which provide audio units that you can plug into, such as Model D for synths, or Stark for guitar amp modeling.

For photo/video, there are a few really great options: Affinity Photo is comparable to Photoshop, and LumaFusion is comparable to Final Cut or Premiere.

Agreed on the music ecosystem. The only thing that gets to me is the lack of keyboard shortcuts and being able to bind any midi cc to anything. You can't use midi to start and stop recording in Garageband for instance, which is something all desktop DAWs let you configure.

LumaFusion is good but I really wish iOS supported more video codecs than two delivery codecs (h264 and h265). I mean, they own ProRes. Cmon just add support for it in iOS.

I believe this is simply because people doing serious coding work always want to have a proper permanently attached keyboard. So they would use a MacBook Air with ARM CPU, but not a tablet.

It's definitely not about the hardware, given that the iPad has. mouse/trackpad support now. It's about the software.

Software is written for hardware. So long as most people don't use iPads with a mouse, few iPad apps will bother optimizing UX for it.

If that was the case no one would write code on a Surface, a laptop with an external keyboard, or even a desktop tower.

I do consider my desktop towers keyboard "permanent".

I don't swap keyboards, I always use that one.

Of course, by that standard, someone with an iPad with a keyboard attached (the ones that are part of a case/cover) could just as easily consider their keyboard "permanent".

Okay but how many people run iPads with keyboard attachments yet don't have a desktop or laptop that would be better for the purpose anyways? I'd wager few.

If that market were larger it would be catered to.

Sounds like a chicken and egg problem. No one does it because the software they need doesn’t exist. The software they need doesn’t exist because no one uses the iPad that way.

VS Code on desktop can run arbitrary processes, that’s how it can, say, have in integrated terminal. You cannot even remotely do that on iPad. Executing Python and JavaScript in a pre-compiled runtime environment[0], like Pythonista and Play.js do, is an entirely different approach and results in completely different products, ones like... Play.js and Pythonista.

The reason that VS Code is not on iPad is 100%, top to bottom that the framework and App Store restrictions prevent running arbitrary processes.

[0]: VS Code can run any binary on your system, iPad apps can only run binaries that they are compiled with. This distinction is why almost no existing development tools can be ported to iPad, almost all development tools are built on interacting with many binaries that the tool was not necessarily compiled with.

So “real software” is just development software?

No. Name desktop class software you want that isn’t available on an iPad and it’s just as valid. Name a profession who can’t do their work on an iPad and it’s just as valid. I just called our development software because this is a software development forum full of software developers.

Hell, why aren’t there more desktop class video games on the iPad? Not because it can’t run them, that’s for sure. The hardware is more than powerful enough.

Have you looked at the state of sound-processing and music-making apps? Drawing and painting apps? Animation apps? Those areas look somehow mature to me.

Yes, no good IDE because the target audience is wielding MBPs anyway.

There are no desktop class games because a touch screen and the control doesn’t translate well and people refuse to pay for premium games.

Gamepads have been available for the iPad since at least 2013.

We have over three decades of evidence in the console market that a game can’t be successful if it requires a non bundled accessory.

Guitar Hero [1] and Rock Band [2] were hugely successful [3] and required bigger and more expensive accessories than a simple gamepad.

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guitar_Hero

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_Band

[3] Guitar Hero III was the first game to reach $1 billion in sales https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2009/01/guitar-hero-iii-first...

The iPad Pro doesn't come with a pen or a keyboard but that doesn't prevent them from flying off the shelves anyway.

How many successful apps require a pen or keyboard?

Microsoft Office and Google Drive would be the big ones. No one's paying $799 to watch Netflix when a $250 iPad will give them the exact same experience.

And notice that neither Microsoft, Google, nor Adobe sell “iPad apps”. They sell a subscription that allows you to use their apps across all platforms.

I've never paid for the app versions of Office or Drive and have used them for years. You can still use them across multiple platforms free of charge.

Because many of us would rather game on a PC, or a console

There is a multitude of reasons for this. Beyond some limitations which still limit the ipad, it is the chick and an egg problem. You won't have real software on the iPad until there are users (buyers) for it and you won't have users until the software exists. This is especially important for corporate usage - at my work place I haven't heard of any iPads being provided to the employees, which means, no one can use an iPad and buy/develop software for one.

There are and were limitations preventing desktop class software on the iPad, some have lifted but it also takes quite a long time to take up on that, see also above.

- Keyboard support. For a lot of tasks, you need a keyboard. It took a long time until Apple sold keyboards for the iPad, and it still was quirky. There is a row of keys missing and even when coupling bluetooth keyboards, the extra keys didn't work. What Apple didn't really get was: a lot of people need an Esc key for their work, many would like funktion keys. It is still a struggle to run as simple as an ssh session on the iPad. Also, so far I haven't found a truely good SSH client on the iPad.

- Mouse support - really has been added only with 13.4, we will see how this develops.

Restrictions by Apple:

- For a long time, there was no real file exchange between apps, no joint file spaces. This has been partially fixed, still feels cumbersome and very much depends on the apps to get right.

- There is a ton of stuff that could be done on the iPad, but is banned outright. Termux is great on Android, not allowed on the iPad. The iPad would be great for development, if not mostly disallowed.

- And yes, for a lot of things, the screen is just too small :).

- The app store. Great and bad at the same time. The issues are probably best seen on macOS, because on macOS the app store is not mandatory. A lost of applications only exists outside the app store. While I liked the convenience of the app store and the fact that I don't have to deal with license keys and was free to use the app I bought across all my devices, the perpetual updates for free are condemning most longterm development. Paid upgrades were the life blood of the software industry for decades. They mean a regular revenue stream from power users like subscriptions, but didn't force the casual user to constantly pay, only when that user wanted the features of the newer versions. Subscriptions currently seem to be the only way, how a actively developed application can survive in that universe, but limits the user base.

- In app purchases. In principle a good idea, it lead to a reality where apps are flooding the app store which constantly try to extort money from the user. That games are allowed to charge in total more than lets say 2x what an AAA title would cost, is scandaleous. A model where an app could offer a free trial and then is purchased normally would be much more supportive of quality app development.

Many of this can be worked around, but unfortunately that is rather the exception. There are still great apps around which are a joy to use, but the whole ecosystem is drowned by all the bad stuff.

> Also, so far I haven't found a truely good SSH client on the iPad.

It might be worth checking out Prompt - supports some nice edge cases too, like SSH agent forwarding.

> - There is a ton of stuff that could be done on the iPad, but is banned outright. Termux is great on Android, not allowed on the iPad. The iPad would be great for development, if not mostly disallowed.

Check out iSH (free, available as a testflight, but also open source on GitHub) - https://github.com/tbodt/ish It's a full user mode x86 emulator, letting you run alpine Linux in a nice terminal, and install packages from it. I don't know to what extent iSH would address your desire for something like Termux.

I am reasonably happy with blink, that it supports mosh is a big bonus as iPadOS likes to kill background tasks, but the screen refresh is not fast (the output is html based) and it doesn't deal well with split windowing.

I am aware of iSH, but as you say, its requires "using" the testflight system and while that might be ok for enthusiasts, it is nothing for the large audience. Obviously , as testflight is limited to 10k users.