Why the iPad still can't replace a computer?

The development problem

First of all, Apple does everything to get young people into coding — but it’s still not possible to develop properly on iOS. Case in point: Xcode hasn’t been ported to this system, and editors like WebStorm or VS Code don’t run on iOS either. For those who do web development, you know that Node and npm have become standard tools, and yet there’s no way to run them here — no software editor has integrated them yet.

So clearly, developers are going to need a computer.

A decent spell checker

What about a port of Antidote for iOS? It’s missing the very thing that makes it my favourite piece of software on Mac — namely, spell checking. So here I’m talking to writers, journalists, and the like. People who use their iPad as a writing tool simply can’t access a spell checker worth the name.

Since the last version, Antidote now has a web version, still in beta. But the unfortunate thing is that this web version runs horribly on Safari iOS. Try correcting a slightly long piece of text and you’ll immediately see the scroll issues. Which brings us back to the point: Safari iOS is just a pale shadow of the Mac version.

And what about Excel?

Excel is really hard to replace — especially for someone with a solid background in spreadsheets. Everything feels slower to do on iOS. When you want to copy a value or a formula, you normally use the mouse to drag the little corner of a cell. On the iPad you have to do it with your finger, and it’s much slower.

Here’s an anecdote that bothered me: I once made a presentation to a client in Excel, with two files to show and the need to switch back and forth between them. You can’t imagine the nightmare on an iPad. Where on a computer you’d just open two Excel windows, on an iPad it’s impossible — you have to constantly close the first file and open the second, over and over.

Inaccessible web versions

Let us access the web versions of our favourite services! This is honestly the most crippling issue in my view — the impossibility of accessing certain web versions of services like Google Suite or Airtable. It’s a limitation I genuinely don’t understand. I’m sure the iPad could handle web versions perfectly well, even if those versions were designed for mouse use — I’m convinced it could work.

Airtable is a service I love, yet their iOS app is way behind the web version. And don’t even get me started on the web version of Google Sheets — a free spreadsheet tool I enjoy a lot, especially for its sharing and collaborative features. Yet on iOS it’s very limited and you can’t access the web service at all.

Ultimately, beyond iOS’s own limitations, if we could get rid of this constraint specifically, I’m sure we could get a lot out of our tablets without too much to complain about.

Really not ready, not yet

So for now, who can actually get by with just an iPad as their main machine? Clearly not everyone — and certainly not naturally. You’ll always have to find workarounds (using workflow automation, for example) to do things you can do in seconds on a computer.

For me, the iPad is a great tool for note-taking, reading, and as a secondary screen to assist me while I’m on the computer — but ultimately it’s just an extension.

I’m curious to know if anyone has actually managed to build complete websites from iOS.

And the future?

I hope iOS moves closer to macOS — starting with freeing up Safari. Having a proper file manager too, being able to simply mount a hard drive, for example.

Better cursor management so you know, in Split View, which app is going to receive your next keystroke.

Better app switching too, because right now it’s slow — apps even reset to their default state on every Alt+Tab.

In short, there’s a lot of work to do. Apple really needs to get back to its original spirit: it’s not up to the user to adapt to iOS, it’s iOS that should adapt to the user. I’m tired of hacking around to do things that