Unless Apple gets off several high horses regarding code signing and, more importantly, app containerization; any Xcode for iPadOS is going to be useless. Like, imagine Xcode without custom build steps or third-party compilers.

The larger problem is that the iPad has a dual nature. At the launch of the product, Apple positioned it as a netbook killer - i.e. a simplified computer for specific tasks, one where the locked down nature of the device might actually be considered a feature. That's why they built everything on iPhone OS[0]. However, there's always been the implication that this is supposed to Someday™ replace the Mac. It keeps getting new features to make it more useful as a computer replacement, which just makes the deliberate restrictions placed on the device more and more glaring. And Apple seems to think they can just keep adding features until they can make you do every computing task wearing a strait-jacket in a padded room.

This particular duality came to a head with the Apple Vision Pro. Any app that would actually be useful on a VR headset is either:

- Incompatible with Apple's code-signing and containerization requirements (i.e. developer tools)

- Not economic to offer at the small scale of the visionOS app market (at least, not while Apple is demanding 30%)

- A game (Apple really doesn't wanna talk about the Vision Pro as a games machine)

On a related note, Swift Playgrounds stopped getting updates almost a year ago. I updated my HTML editor demo project for iPadOS 26 and now I can't even compile it because Apple has yet to ship the version 26 SDK. And there's really nothing any third party can do to fix Swift Playgrounds to make it actually usable again.

[0] Strictly speaking, Apple's first internal demos of capacitive touch were for a tablet project specifically to spite Windows XP tablets. Although by the time they were writing actual shipping code it was intended for iPhone and iPad came later.

Everyone that argues about this misses the point.

It isn't about doing and publishing apps without having to buy a mac.

Rather having a more powerful development experience that isn't as constrained as Swift Playgrounds, useful for prototyping ideas.

I do not care if in a similar vein, to a Smalltalk like environment I would always need to run the app from inside the dev env, and then use a Mac, or some cloud build workflow if I ever would like to actually publish it.

Just like I use several other coding on the go environments.