Apple Is This Close to Turning the iPad into an App-Development Tool

There’s a decent case made on ep 258 of the Merge Conflict podcast that Apple released the IDE for iPadOS as Swift Platgrounds because if it had been named Xcode it would have missed expectations by far too much.

If Xcode on iPadOS doesn’t have parity with MacOs, people would be miserable. But by calling it SP, it can be like a nerfed Xcode and still good.

My understanding is that iPad isn't a good coding tool not just because of Apple, but because tablets in general aren't ergonomic. Does anyone use android / surface pro w/o keyboard / some other touch screen for app development?

Kind of like how pen/stylus and paper/tablet happens to be ideal for drawing, it seems like keyboard and monospace happens to be ideal for programming.

This appeals to me even as a professional dev because I'm not a professional iOS dev, but occasionally I feel some interest in throwing together a simple iOS app before I hit the wall of Xcode and give up

I am running the new iPadOS beta and I don't see any new options fro app development. Anyone know what I am doing wrong, or have a link to some docs?

I’ve been using Pythonista for a while, it’s pretty great..

> But Swift Playgrounds 4 isn’t the big announcement the developer community was waiting for. It has significant limits and lacks several advanced tools — debugging and profiling tools, versioning, storyboard integration, support for third-party packages, etc. “Swift Playgrounds is great for experimenting and debugging code, but it is missing many of the features ... required to make fuller-fledged apps,” Haas explains. He says the program is “perfect for developing small utility applications, such as a to-do list, but currently incapable of building the next Angry Birds.”

I worry that Apple is going down the Microsoft hole of trying to build one IDE that does everything you might possibly need to utilize the platform. Visual Studio has been hellishly complicated for years because there was no thought towards third party integrations or extensions that may have improved the environment.

And, yeah, Xcode is definitely Darwin's version of Visual Studio. But at least on macOS you have the bash escape hatch. You can install CocoaPods. You can install the Xcode CLI tools and not touch the application at all (like how the Flutter / React Native extensions for VS Code do it). You could install Ionic or Xamarin's tools and build apps that way.

When we asked for "Xcode on iPad," we didn't just mean building a mobile version of Xcode. Xcode on iPad meant support for developer tools like compilers, bundlers, interpreters, bash scripts, etc.

> But the most significant thing about Swift Playgrounds 4, to the developers I spoke to, is what it indicates about Apple’s vision for the future of the iPad. To many, it is a hint that coding on iPads is a priority for Apple — and that “Xcode on iPad,” and perhaps a user interface that better complements it, might be on the way.

Maybe it is a hint for the future: Apple loves dipping their toes into things over multiple years. Shortcuts, for example, started out missing a ton of critical functionality that has been patched in in subsequent iOS updates, and it is slowly becoming useful in more situations. I'm okay with Swift Playgrounds becoming more powerful so long as we have the escape hatch we have on Mac (which we don't).

I'm worried that maybe the future is darker though; I'm worried Apple will reject all third party developer tools and only Xcode will have this capability of compiling and previewing apps. In that case, iPad development will never take off, even though it deserves to.

The answer to all of this is sideloading. But as they continue to remain hostile to that idea, I don't understand what their plan is to target the pro demographic of developers, who onboard new tools every month and have a very specific and unique workflow to get their job done.