I’ve been developing full-time on an iPad for the past two years. I got the idea from a series of blog posts that were written in 2011, so it’s not a new idea.

I’ve been developing full-time on an iPad for the past two years. I got the idea from a series of blog posts that were written in 2011, so it’s not a new idea. If you search Twitter for #codespaces you’ll see after Microsoft announced Github Codespaces (a web-based IDE based on VSCode), much of the attention was on how this will further enable development on an iPad. Personally I used AWS Cloud9 which does the same as Codespaces. The iPad is a computer with a keyboard and mouse and a full-featured web browser. There are also language-specific native IDEs like Pythonista and Play.js. There are Git clients available natively as well. Pretty much the only thing you can’t do is make iPad apps on the iPad, which is a pretty small subset of programmers. Pythonista costs $10 and has nearly 1k reviews, so someone must be using it. So why do people constantly ask “does anyone really want to develop on a computer that offers many development options?” The answer is yes, of course people seriously want to develop on an iPad.