A follow up to the two-part series on imagining Mac OS big Sur running on the iPad Pro. I came across this blog post that described what it would take to free the iPad itself from the current constraints of iPad OS without running Mac OS on it. Some of the writer’s recommendations:
Introduce Gatekeeper and app notarization for iOS. The process of side-loading apps should not be as simple as downloading them from the App Store. Bury it in Settings, make it slightly convoluted, whatever: just have an officially-sanctioned way of doing it.
Ruthlessly purge the App Store Guidelines of anything that prevents the iPad from serving as a development machine. Every kind of development from web to games should be possible on an iPad. And speaking of games—emulators should be allowed, too.
Introduce Time Machine backups for iPadOS.
I don’t disagree with her. But I wonder if it’s simply better to optimize the two operating systems – iPadOS and Mac OS – for different types of users, and let them choose what they want to run on their Apple hardware. The iPad app ecosystem is already open on the Mac. The logical next step is to make Mac OS available on the iPad