A while ago, I suggested that the best iPad for a developer was the MacBook Air. At WWDC 2025, Apple revealed all sorts of power features for the new iPadOS 26 including a whole new windowing mode and support for long running processes like Final Cut exports. While these are fantastic improvements for some power users, these still don’t give developers what they need to make the iPad a great tool for writing code. Long story short – keep that MacBook Air around for on-the-go coding for a while longer.

What’s still missing that a dev needs? The knee jerk answer is obviously Xcode. But why can’t they port Xcode? It’s just a glorified text editor, surely less complex than Final Cut and editing ProRes 4K HDR video. The real answer is fork(), the system library function to create a new process. Folks tend to think about Xcode as a thing that builds apps, but it’s really just a graphical frontend that calls command line tools that builds apps. Most development IDEs work in a similar way. VS Code, JetBrains IDES and others are just coordinators that invoke command line tools (via fork()) to do the actual work. This sort of architecture has a long history in computing but is antithetical to the iPadOS security model that bans fork(). Without the ability to spawn a command line tool, IDEs on iPad remain dead in the water.

At WWDC 25, Apple introduced a new technology called Containerization, which works like Docker and lets you run Linux containers on your Mac. Apple’s take on running containers focuses on security, performance, and resource management. That’s great and all, but Containerization is a foundational technology – not something that is immediately useful for everyone, but provides the tools to build things that are. What if Xcode’s toolchain ran in a container, instead of directly on your Mac? It’s a relatively straightforward thing to encapsulate the compiler chain into a container and run it on your source code. And what if containers could run on iPad? Now you’ve got the potential for an Xcode UI on iPad that talks to a sandboxed container running Linux, where processes can be forked freely while securely sealed off in their container. Problem solved!

Apple is really good at surprising us with fantastic new features that are built on foundational technologies deployed over the course of years and many OS releases. It’s fun to think about how some of the new low level tech might come together in the future to finally make iPad a viable dev platform. In the meantime, that M1 MacBook Air is on sale for just $650! Or $600 for an M4 Mac mini!