I disagree. There are many classes of applications on the Play Store and F-droid not on the App Store, including multiple browsing engines and emulators.

I would wager that within weeks or months there would be a full windows VM available for the iPad if it was allowed.

Apple allows you to sideload those kinds of apps using the developer certificate. Emulators, VMs etc have existed for years.

Again it’s far more the form factor that is a restriction than whether it’s downloadable from the store or not.

>Apple allows you to sideload those kinds of apps using the developer certificate.

A TEMPORARY developer certificate that expires and requires a MacOS system to install.

Meanwhile I can click to download an apk through the browser on my phone, click accept and install. No expiration, no self signed certificates, no other system needed.

A while back I paid Apple $99 for the privilege of compiling an open source emulator and side loading it to my iPad and then having to re-load is after some period of time. It was not worth the effort.

For the average user, it is not even within the ballpark of their abilities.

I would argue that the reason is less form factor and more computational power. The M1 brings best-of-class laptop performance to a tablet, combined with a keyboard and a Linux distro and I would have a much more powerful platform than my current laptop.

You don’t need to pay to develop or sideboard applications to your idevice.

Yes you do, otherwise you are limited to 2 and forced to resign every week, a purposeful limitation that apple has implemented

It's very much not something you could depend on as a component of a serious workflow. You have to stay on top of certificates, and Apple can change those rules at any time.

I guess we're going to pretend that all those Humble Bundle users don't exist at all.

termux is pretty popular.

Though android is locking down, making this kind of app difficult in future.

It’s pretty popular amongst a tiny fraction of the Linux developer community.

They are not the type of people who are buying iPads or will be spending big within the Apple ecosystem.

Because they can't

iPads also outsell and outperform Android tablets by several orders of magnitude