iPadOS technologies help you take advantage of the unique functionality of iPad. Powered by the iOS SDK, your iPadOS apps can deliver robust support for multiple windows, effortless drawing and writing with Apple Pencil, seamless virtual reality experiences, and much more.
Fully featured external display support enables desktop-class workflows, while enhancements to the multitasking experience keep important apps and content visible and easily accessible. Optimize your app’s UI to support dynamic window resizing and to look great on large displays.
Build powerful document editing apps with the new editor-style navigation bar, which brings the flexibility of the Mac toolbar to iPad and allows for full customization. Let people access common editing operations with just a tap. Add a title menu with quick actions to move, duplicate, rename, export, share, and drag documents.
Create smooth text editing experiences by adopting the enhanced text editing menu, which adapts visually based on the type of user input (touch or pointer).
Support “Find and Replace” in text. Configure your text view to open the standard system Find panel with a single API and leverage the new find interaction for custom text implementations.
Improve content discovery with the new inline search UI. Provide search suggestions to help people discover your content even quicker.
With multitasking capabilities, such as Slide Over, Split View, and Picture in Picture, users can quickly switch from one app to another using intuitive gestures.
Your apps can let users move text, images, and files from one app to another with multitouch APIs. Support drag and drop to let them quickly move content in a way that feels natural.
In iPadOS, apps can support multiple windows. For example, users of a document creation app can work on several documents at once, use the app in Split View or in multiple spaces, and even work with multiple apps in Slide Over.
Dynamic pointer effects and behaviors enhance the experience of using a pointing device with iPad. As the pointing device is used, iPadOS automatically adapts the pointer to the current context, providing rich visual feedback and just the right level of precision needed to enhance productivity and simplify common tasks.
Apple Pencil is great for drawing, sketching, coloring, taking notes, marking up emails, and more with pixel-perfect precision and industry-leading low latency. Your apps can take advantage of its intuitive touch surface, which can support double-tap and squeeze gestures, haptics, and barrel-roll angle tracking. And you can easily add a full drawing experience to your app using PencilKit — with access to a canvas, responsive inks, a rich tool palette, and a drawing model in iPadOS.
Files supports USB drives, SD cards, and file servers. And features like Column View, Quick Actions, and local storage make Files even more powerful. If your app stores and manages user documents, you can implement a File Provider extension to give users access to their content while they’re using other apps.
Your app can contribute fonts for systemwide use, integrate other contributed fonts, and choose from several system UI fonts offered through the font picker interface.
These secure ways to unlock, authenticate, and pay let users quickly access your app with just a glance or a touch of their finger. The Secure Enclave, a hardware-based security processor isolated from the rest of the system, encrypts and protects the user’s data.
Apple Pay provides an easy and secure way to pay within your apps and on the web. Users can quickly provide their payment, shipping, and contact information to check out.
Your users can easily sign in to your apps using their Apple ID. Instead of filling out forms, verifying email addresses, and choosing new passwords, they can use Sign in with Apple to set up an account and start using your app right away.
Easily discoverable and quick to launch at the moment it’s needed, an App Clip is a small part of your app that lets users start and finish an experience in seconds. And after you’ve demonstrated the value of your app with your App Clip, you can provide the opportunity to download your full app.
Widgets deliver a small amount of timely, useful information or app-specific functionality. They’re easy to build and make available across iOS, iPadOS, and macOS with the WidgetKit framework and SwiftUI. Users can visit the widget gallery to search, preview sizes, and place widgets anywhere on the Home Screen to access important details at a glance. Smart Stacks learn from the user’s daily activity to surface the most relevant widget at just the right time.
Safari on iPad supports the latest web standards and automatically configures websites and web apps to touch, delivering a rich browsing experience with blazing-fast performance, industry-leading security, and modern desktop features. Your site or embedded web view can take advantage of powerful features and coding best practices to deliver a best-in-class user experience for iPad.
ARKit delivers an incredible awareness of people with the People Occlusion feature that lets AR content realistically pass behind and in front of people in the real world, the ability to integrate human movement into your app, and much more. RealityKit — Appleʼs rendering, animation, physics, and audio engine — can power your AR apps, allowing you to seamlessly integrate virtual objects into the real world.
With on-device model training and a gallery of curated models, thereʼs never been a better time to take advantage of machine learning. Core ML seamlessly takes advantage of the CPU, GPU, and Neural Engine to provide maximum performance and efficiency, and lets you integrate the latest cutting-edge models into your apps.
Your apps can use SiriKit and Shortcuts to help users get things done with just their voice, intelligent suggestions, or the Shortcuts app. And with Shortcuts on a variety of Apple platforms, your apps can integrate even further.
iPad apps can run without modification on Apple silicon Macs, opening new possibilities for users and developers alike. These apps can be optimized to work with keyboards, windows, and touch-input gestures by using existing capabilities that are already available to iPad apps.
Get a head start on creating a Mac app based on your existing iPad app. Your Mac and iPad apps share the same project and source code, so any changes you make translate to both platforms. And your newly created Mac app uses the same frameworks, resources, and even runtime environment as apps built just for Mac.
Most iPadOS apps can run unmodified on Apple Vision Pro, so your app can easily extend to this new platform — with no additional work required. Your compatible iPad and iPhone apps will be published automatically on the App Store for Apple Vision Pro, using the metadata you’ve already provided.
When you update your existing project for visionOS, the user interface of your app takes on the standard visionOS system appearance and you can add platform-specific capabilities. In most cases, you’ll only need to update your Xcode project’s settings and recompile your code.
ClassKit allows your app to work with Schoolwork — a powerful iPad app for teachers and students to help keep track of assignments and student progress.
Deliver personalized app experiences on an iPad shared by multiple users. Store and manage user-specific data from your app in the cloud, so a user can access their information from any device.