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Comment by mattkevan | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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