Consider

The editor reflects on whether pro iOS apps are where they ought to be.

As we prepared to send this issue to press, rumors were circulating that Apple would introduce updated iPad hardware at some point in March. By the time you’re reading this, we’ll know for sure how that panned out, but the mere possibility of new hardware, combined with talk that Apple would be relaxing its annual development cycle, got me wondering whether iPad software in 2018 is really where we expect it to be.

I don’t mean the operating system itself, but apps for it. While Apple has taken steps to make the Mac and iOS devices great companions, such as by enabling us to move projects between Logic Pro X and GarageBand, I’ve recently found myself frustrated by the inability to do pretty simple things on my iPad.

The first is in Pages. You can apply paragraph styles such as headings and captions, just as in the Mac version. What you can’t do on iOS, though, is make changes to an applied style, update that style’s definition, and have those changes applied to all instances of the style in your document. You can certainly create good-looking docs on iOS, but at a certain point you’ll want to switch to a Mac to finish the task efficiently and comfortably.

The second obstacle I ran into is the unavailability of pro-level iOS apps. Software developers have been talking for years about when the hardware and software might reach the point of enabling them to make iOS apps on iOS itself, rather than a Mac. That’s a pretty complex scenario for various reasons, but my needs are much simpler: I want to be able to create comparatively simple documents on iOS. By which I mean electronic books. I’m pretty disappointed that there isn’t a version of iBooks Author that runs on iPad — at least on the 10.5 and 12.9-inch Pro models.

Is this really where the iPad should be at in 2018, eight years after the first model went on sale? Apple may well be looking at alleviating some of the pressure in its development cycle, but as the iPad’s tenth anniversary draws closer, I really hope to see many more pro-level apps for it.