Pierre Perrin

With iPadOS Stage Manager and external display support, the iPad hardware is finally powerful enough to handle serious multi-window productivity.

Yet, most developer tools and productivity apps still treat iPadOS like a single-screen iPhone app. That s a massive missed opportunity.

Imagine a mobile setup where you can seamlessly run:

• Window 1: A fullscreen remote IDE (VS Code / Codespaces)

• Window 2: Your app preview / local browser

• Window 3: API documentation or terminal logs

• ...all scaled cleanly across Stage Manager or an external 4K monitor.

More and more developers are moving from heavy local setups to cloud-hosted environments like GitHub Codespaces, Coder/code-server, or Gitpod.

The advantages are clear: standardized team environments, instant container spin-ups, and the ability to access your exact workspace from any device (even an iPad). But local dev still reigns supreme for offline work and raw latency.

We're building Vysio (https://vysio.app), a native iPad client for cloud IDEs, to make remote development seamless on tablet (Ipad for now).

Let's be realistic: an iPad probably won't replace a main 16" MacBook Pro workstation for full-time, heavy local development.

However, for occasional dev work, quick bug fixes while traveling light, weekend on-call duty, reviewing PRs, or running a cloud container on the go, iPad + Magic Keyboard + Cloud IDEs (like GitHub Codespaces or code-server) can be a game-changer.

The main issue today isn't hardware performance; it's mobile Safari browser limitations (keyboard shortcut collisions like Cmd+W, address bar clutter, and connection drops).