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Comment by skohan | Hacker News Reader

The new iPads literally have the same SOC as what are some of, if not the best consumer laptops on the planet currently. But what can you do with them? Not a heck of a lot, thanks to the walled garden that is iPad OS. If you ask me, that's a crying shame.

I don't see how it hurts anyone to allow side-loading of apps on iOS devices. Even if you make it as hard as having a toggle behind a scary warning 2 layers deep in the menu, 95% of users will never use it, and it will open up a world of opportunities for people who actually want to create with their devices.

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Where is the evidence that allowing sideloaded apps will result in an explosion of desktop class apps ?

Hasn’t been the case with Android. And I would say the touch centric form factor is far more an issue.

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

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.

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.

>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.

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

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

Being able to dual boot or virtualize Ubuntu and windows 10 on an M1 iPad Pro with 16gb of ram and a touchscreen would be great.

Parallels already runs on m1 it wouldn’t be very hard to enable on m1 iPads.

It is honestly a better form factor than the laptop as you can just plug in a thunderbird dock and get expanded ports.

By create you mean develop, right?

The iPad is already one of the best creation tools out there for artists, musicians, photographers etc.

I’d suggest the iPad is hampered more by the limits of iPadOS’ multitasking UI and it’s roots as a scaled-up phone OS - and the scarcity of truly pro-level software - rather than the App Store and not being able to sideload.

In fact the only real reasons to sideload or jailbreak at the moment are to get around the limitations on running dynamic code - or to use cracked/dodgy versions of paid apps.

Wouldn’t be surprised if we see some big improvements in the dev experience over the next few system releases, but to say this will enable a burst of creativity is ignoring all the highly creative ways it’s already being used.

No one really jailbreaks for cracked apps. There are many small reasons to jailbreak. Most apps are paid via in app purchases that can’t be cracked. Very few apps are paid and popular enough to be cracked and not crash upon attempting to use. It is something that may have been true a decade ago. The cliche needs to stop ever since in app purchases took over most spending.

That’s because of in-app purchases, which create terrible crippled naggy software.

Sadly, this will accelerate the ecosystem away from tools like procreate and affinity into “each brush is $1”.

You might be right, but I’m personally sad to see this playing out in a way that makes it worse.

Especially because how big was piracy ever on iOS? It would be a fraction of jailbreakers. Who were always a significant minority of iOS users. So we’re talking under 10% of users who use at least one cracked app at the peak. Most likely. Likely less and def less for people using multiple pirated apps regularly. 5% piracy rate is still not helpful or good to some developers, but that’s not going to do much at all to the bottom line.

So yeah unfortunate. Both the high price of yearly or monthly subscriptions and the specific in app purchases for things like brushes.

iPad has some good tools for content creation. Procreate for example is probably one of the best drawing tools available at the moment.

But these apps are still largely islands. Powerful pro workflows require multiple applications to be used together in interesting ways. With iPad that's impossible. You have an anemic file system, and strict limitations on what an app can do.

What I want is a proper *Nix layer, like I have on macOS. For instance, if I want to synchronize my files across multiple systems, I need my iPad app to have a built-in solution for that. I want to be able to run a daemon in the background to synchronize my creative work with an S3 bucket using a custom protocol of my choosing. That kind of customizability is just not possible on iPad, and it's a huge limitation.

Even a lot of amateur workflows are difficult to impossible on the iPad. I'm an amateur photographer and after using the iPad Pro as my primary editing computer for months I gave up and went back to Windows. I wanted to make it work. I really did. The file system makes the workflow incredibly painful, my preferred RAW converter isn't available, and the Adobe apps that are available are sorely lacking compared to the desktop versions. I have a couple hundred dollars worth of Photoshop plug-ins and none of them work on the iPad. There isn't even a way to load plug-ins on iPad. I can't print at all (yes, some of us still like to print). Backups can't be automated. Internal storage is very limited and external drives are painful to use. There's simply no way to tell when the iPad is accessing the external drive or not. I have had to perform multiple filesystem repairs because of that.

The iPad has some definite advantages. Battery life is great, performance is great, the screen is amazing, but it's all severely crippled by the software. Until Apple makes the OS as powerful as MacOS there is no point at all in having so much power that you simply can't use.

> If you ask me, that's a crying shame.

If they ask you, buy the MacBook Air instead of the iPad Pro!

The point is that a developer could have a lot of fun experimenting with the tablet form factor and inputs, with the full power of a desktop system (including hardware x86 emulation which is currently unusable!) but we can't because Apple says we can only use the hardware we bought in the way which they intend it.

Imagine how you would react with any other product you paid for, and brought into your home, if the company which produced it had the right to dictate how you could and could not use it.

And you can not buy iPads.

I know it is completely anathema to suggest something like this on HN these days as the socialist wave completely took it over and the mere suggestion that people have the freedom to not buy something if they don't think it fits within their world view instead of trying to force everyone using the state and the courts to cater specifically to them is now considered a sin, but...

You said it yourself, you have a laptop with the exact same chip that lets you do all the things you want, and then you have the iPad that doesn't...why don't you buy the laptop instead? Surely if enough people feel the way you do Apple would get the message.

You don’t think Apple has a team of people trying to figure out what you can do with them? iPadOS isn’t designed to cripple the HW, its designed to extract the most from it. Its missing some traditional use cases

iPadOS is designed to extract the most revenue from the hardware, and the users. An more-open platform would allow for many things that would likely be really awesome for users, but is disallowed because that would threaten Apple's revenue streams.

Which is exactly what anti-trust regulation is supposed to protect us from, it's a shame it's quite impotent at the moment

in a few seconds I can think of many many ways an ipad is crippled.

- look at your data directly and back it up

- backup and restore the entire device including apps

- use ethernet through the lightning port instead of wifi

- use general usb devices through the lightning port

- wifi scanner (apple disallowed it in ios early-on)

- tcpdump network traffic

- change the wifi-off shortcut to actually turn it off (matching settings)

- firewall

I'm sure people can think of other examples...

iPad Pro supports ethernet and general USB devices.

And allowing apps to sniff network traffic defeats the entire security model of the device which many of us like.

I want more privacy and security in my devices not less.

Sniffing network traffic would not defeat anything, provided you are prompted about the necessary permissions.

The problem with those permission prompts is that many users blindly accept them. If a “sniff all network traffic” permission were allowed, it would take all of one day before Facebook et al release an update with it and start siphoning millions of users network traffic.

Apple does not want this.

Apple would probably also prefer it if I had to use an in-app purchase to pay my rent, but luckily we live in a nation of laws, and Apple doesn't get to decide everything based on unilateral self-interest.

How does it defeat your security if other people want to look at network traffic on the device they purchased?

Because I don't want apps to be actually sniffing traffic whilst pretending to be something else.

You could solve this with OS-level permissions for this kind of thing, the same way Apple now handles cross-app tracking

All of this is available if jailbroken. There aren’t many people caring too much about most of these.

I personally enjoy parts of the first two. They aren’t deal breakers if I can’t jailbreak/root though.

Jailbraking is fine as a hobby, but it's not viable to build serious workflows on top of what's essentially a cat-and-mouse game between Apple and the jailbreak community

>All of this is available if jailbroken.

should read:

All of this is available if you use the same exploits that malware often use to compromise systems.

"Jailbreaking" is not a feature inherent to iOS so stop trying to say it's an option. It really isn't.

An option is something that continues to be available to the user regardless of system updates and without restriction. As such, sideloading apps is an option on Android.

Jailbreak is not a feature. It is the result of the LACK of features.

I didn’t make my post clear enough. I was stating most people don’t care for these features that are available when jailbroken. My post was not about this being an “option” but that the list of features aren’t important to even the more geeky jailbreaking users.

Regardless of me not being specific in my post, your reply has a ton of assumptions and unnecessary attitude in my opinion.

Yeah exactly, the main thing which is missing is being able to have direct access to the file system in a programmatic way, an to run arbitrary processes (including background processes) which operate on the file system. Until then the way software can be combined to do interesting things will be severely limited.

>look at your data directly and back it up

>backup and restore the entire device including apps

Ironically these areas are where iOS shines. Despite being a heavily walled garden, it grants you full backups and full user filesystem access (including things like keychain) via extracting those backups.

A comparable and unrooted Android tablet cannot be fully backed up, and you cannot inspect app/user settings areas of its filesystem.

> Ironically these areas are where iOS shines.

You as a device owner do not have access to the full ios filesystem. full stop.

You get way more access on unjailbroken iOS than on unrooted Android. The equivalent of the entire /data partition is available to both read and write via iTunes backups with very few exceptions.

On Android, you used to be able to backup maybe half of app/user data in this way (many devs opted out), now closer to zero (adb backup deprecated)

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