I have a 10th gen iPad.
I am curious what the current state of coding is on the iPad?
Ask HN: Coding on an iPad?
1–10 of 21 posts
Re: Ask HN: Coding on an iPad?
#2AFAIK this is still mostly forbidden by Apple
> 2.5.2 Apps should be self-contained in their bundles, and may not read or write data outside the designated container area, nor may they download, install, or execute code which introduces or changes features or functionality of the app, including other apps. Educational apps designed to teach, develop, or allow students to test executable code may, in limited circumstances, download code provided that such code is not used for other purposes. Such apps must make the source code provided by the app completely viewable and editable by the user.
https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/
So except for education you can't code on an iPad.
That said, you could access a website like stackblitz or codepen or codesandbox. No idea how well those run on iPad.
Re: Ask HN: Coding on an iPad?
#3Swift Playgrounds is Apple‘s preferred answer.
Re: Ask HN: Coding on an iPad?
#4AFAIK this is still mostly forbidden by Apple > 2.5.2 Apps should be self-contained in their bundles, and may not read or write data outside the designated container area, nor may they download, install, or execute code which introduces or changes features or functionality of the app, including other apps. Educational apps designed to teach, develop, or allow students to test executable code may, in limited circumsta…
I thought you can do a SwiftUI project on an iPad using playgrouds, then send the project to your macbook if you want to release from there. I never tried it though.
Re: Ask HN: Coding on an iPad?
#5Coding as in the act of writing code is easy. There are a handful of editors and a good git client (Working Copy). You can get several terminal emulator apps, but they don't really let you run anything local like most people would want from a terminal, but from them you can access remote systems (Blink gives you access to VS Code for the Web, or whatever it's called).
For running on the iPad, there is the obvious Swift Playgrounds published by Apple, and several apps that give you Python and Jupyter notebook access and execution. I'm not sure about other languages. You'll want a physical keyboard to make effective use of these options.
Replit has an app, last I used it it was kind of awful though, the website worked better. All the code runs on their servers.
Get a terminal app and ssh to a more useful computer, is my advice, if you want to use the iPad as a development device. I found it to be a perfectly good remote terminal device when I was traveling around a lot and didn't want to take a lot of things with me. But I'm very comfortable in the terminal and with emacs.
Re: Ask HN: Coding on an iPad?
#6AFAIK this is still mostly forbidden by Apple > 2.5.2 Apps should be self-contained in their bundles, and may not read or write data outside the designated container area, nor may they download, install, or execute code which introduces or changes features or functionality of the app, including other apps. Educational apps designed to teach, develop, or allow students to test executable code may, in limited circumsta…
I thought you can do a SwiftUI project on an iPad using playgrouds, then send the project to your macbook if you want to release from there. I never tried it though.
https://support.apple.com/guide/playgrounds-ipad/share-a-pla...
You can actually publish from the iPad now. I think that's been an option for 2 years or so.
Re: Ask HN: Coding on an iPad?
#7For anything serious your best bet is using an SSH client like Prompt or Blink, or an RDP client (Microsoft's app is decent).
You might have some luck with something like iSH, but it's pretty janky if you have to do real work.
Juno is a decent workflow for Python/Jupyter and has local execution, but it's far from a complete IDE.
Re: Ask HN: Coding on an iPad?
#8I have an iPad and joined HN about the time the first iPad shipped.
My guess is programming on one is about the same as it has always been:
1. Either a kludge of necessity or an expression lifestyle identification.
2. An uphill fight against Apple’s design discipline for iOS.
3. Doable to some degree if everything is accessed through the web including tooling.
That it is not an obvious mainstream practice suggests that it is little different.
Re: Ask HN: Coding on an iPad?
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thought you can do a SwiftUI project on an iPad using playgrouds, then send the project to your macbook if you want to release from there. I never tried it though.
https://support.apple.com/guide/playgrounds-ipad/share-a-pla... You can actually publish from the iPad now. I think that's been an option for 2 years or so.
Yes of course, Apple doesn't have to follow it's own rules.
Re: Ask HN: Coding on an iPad?
#10I don't think you can do anything serious locally.
IMO, the best option is hosting a VS Code server [0] on a linux box and using Tailscale to connect to it via the browser. At that point you have a real compute environment and a pretty usable IDE.
But the screen and keyboard were too small so I gave it up.