tobis blog

Using an iPad as a productivity machine with iOS 26 in 2025

It is no secret that Apple has been trying to push the iPad product line, especially iPad Pro models, as alternative to a regular Mac for a long time. iPad devices are also pretty popular in the education environment and are the de-facto standard.

As someone who has recently started studying digital railway systems, I however see lots of problems with the current state of iPad and iPadOS 26.

With iPad OS 26 finally bringing proper windowing to iPad, regular multitasking has improved a lot. I still however find the fact that I cannot just have a single space, like I can on a Mac, very confusing. I just want regular windowing, not some kind of weird windowing where I regularly am unable to find the window I just had open a few minutes ago.

Apart from windowing problems, I also have run in to problems with several other aspects of Apple‘s platform restrictions:

– Third-party browser support:
The EU has recently forced Apple to allow web browsers using custom rendering engines (such as Firefox‘s Gecko engine), however neither Mozilla nor Google have as of yet released an actual version of browsers using this feature. This is, at least according to my current research, due to the fact that these changes that the EU has forced upon Apple, only apply to EU customers or regions. As a developer, essential features like the web inspector or even just extensions like password managers remain unavailable in Firefox.

– Native development infrastructure
I miss my terminal, my packages needed for web development, my git client and other useful scripts I usually run on my Mac. Even Microsoft has a proper terminal, a package manager and a proper shell now. From my experience in the jailbreaking scene since pretty much forever, I know simply porting Terminal.app is rather trivial (MobileTerminal and NewTerm do still exist), but providing a userland for developers is rather hard. Every binary would need to be signed, transparently and some kind of package manager would be needed as well. A chroot-like environment (provide a base system at /Developer and iCloud Drive at ~, file providers at /Volumes/*) would help a lot.

I know many will say: Use this or that cloud development tool (https://vscode.dev) in a browser!, but that doesn‘t help me when I want to run something locally.

UTM (SE) is useful for this kind of development as it can provide port forwarding and run a arm64 Linux VM, but due to Apple‘s restrictions, it is by default unable to use JIT and runs really slowly. Also file/folder sharing is rather suboptimal.

The lack of proper GUI development tools like Xcode, local VSCode oder Sublime Text is also really frustrating. This is of course largely due to the fact that none of the developers of these projects seem to care about iPad users using a mouse and keyboard. With apps like VSCode using electron, compiling for iOS shouldn‘t be much harder than just adding another target.

In short: For real development, a proper laptop/desktop machine with a proper desktop OS is still necce