People Are Using Ipad OS Features on Their Iphones
Postedabout 2 months agoActiveabout 2 months ago
idevicecentral.comTechstoryHigh profile
calmmixed
Debate
70/100
IosIpadosAppleJailbreakingCustomization
Key topics
Ios
Ipados
Apple
Jailbreaking
Customization
The article discusses how some iPhone users are enabling iPadOS features on their devices, sparking a discussion on Apple's device limitations and user customization.
Snapshot generated from the HN discussion
Discussion Activity
Very active discussionFirst comment
4h
Peak period
127
Day 1
Avg / period
26.7
Comment distribution160 data points
Loading chart...
Based on 160 loaded comments
Key moments
- 01Story posted
Nov 16, 2025 at 9:39 PM EST
about 2 months ago
Step 01 - 02First comment
Nov 17, 2025 at 1:18 AM EST
4h after posting
Step 02 - 03Peak activity
127 comments in Day 1
Hottest window of the conversation
Step 03 - 04Latest activity
Nov 26, 2025 at 10:22 PM EST
about 2 months ago
Step 04
Generating AI Summary...
Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns
ID: 45950408Type: storyLast synced: 11/20/2025, 6:30:43 PM
Want the full context?
Jump to the original sources
Read the primary article or dive into the live Hacker News thread when you're ready.
Jailbreak stores have never felt like a particularly strong illustration of what's possible due to their tiny user market - I'd love to see what developers would do if even for a period we could use these devices to anything remotely like their potential.
But really, imagine how much power these things have and if you could actually run a free (as in freedom, in the GNU sense) OS on them and really get access to all that power in a handheld device. Only if.
I have an M1, which is like N-times faster than the laptop I write this on. Yet it collects dust because I'd rather continue to use this old dinosaur laptop because that M1 macbook is a locked down, very fast, shiny Ferrari, but I just want a Honda Civic I can do whatever I want with.
Could you elaborate? What specifically would you do? Because I'm finding it hard to imagine what I'd do with an "open" iPhone that I can't do now, but it's extremely easy to imagine all the horrific security risks that would emerge in what today is most people's primary computing device, storing data about literally their entire lives.
If you're finding it hard to imagine what you can do with a device that _does not_ restrict what you can do with it, then you're likely fine in the Apple ecosystem, that's fair and okay. Some people aren't, you'll just have to take my word for it, I don't wanna write an essay here and you're probably not interesting in reading all that.
Security risk is a common one that comes up. Google used that to justify locking down sideloading recently. Let me take the risk. I bought this device, I should be allowed to make adult decision right? I'm not downloading stuff off Limewire or a shady website. I'm downloading stuff off of Linux distro repos or F-Droid.
There's a lot more to be said about all this. Including the amount of e-waste created because a device is too old to supported, yet it's people run decade(s) old laptops/desktops using free OSs because they can.
Just my 1AM rambling thoughts. Hope some of it makes some sense.
Go on, give some examples.
On a unrestricted OS, I can just switch to a different desktop environment.
If you read the rest of this thread, instead of asking, you'll find plenty examples. But hey, if you like MacOS, great, anyone else's opinions don't matter.
Yeah, was obvious from the first comment
A bit like how you buy a can of Coke and you can't add your own sugar. It just comes with sugar, unless you buy a different product from Coke, which is a fixed choice of sweetener. Saying "other products let you choose whether or not to add that sugar or sweetener" to me doesn't mean that Coke need to change anything.
* Use (true) Firefox w/ extensions or other browsers
* Sideload apps that aren't available in the store (this is increasingly common with open source projects that don't want the headache of dealing with app stores)
* Install my own apps and not have to deal with paying Apple or reinstalling every few days or week or whatever
* Write bash and ruby scripts to automate things on my device which often require interacting with system APIs (tmux is my platform for this on Android currently)
* Pin versions of apps that have enshittified or sold to gross companies that harvest data or switch to subscriptions models by copying the APK and re-installing it on new devices
* Install alternate/experimental graphical shells that are frequently innovative and interesting (though rarely useful in the long-term, but it's still fun)
* Option to use other ROMs such as Graphene OS
* Capture packets and proxy traffic to see what my device is doing (this has gotten pretty hard on Android now, but still something I want to do)
* Have an on-device fine-grained firewall to tightly control which apps are allowed network access
There are definitely other things I can't think of at the moment, but I'm not sure why you're being so hostile to GP. Saying that iOS devices are locked down and can't do a lot of stuff doesn't seem like a very controversial opinion, especially on HN.
No longer true as of this year.
> tmux
typo?
I agree with you about side loading. Apple does not. I wonder if regulations can eventually force their hand.
Some of your other points (scripting, packet sniffing, general terminal and command line stuff) are just done differently, and you'd just need new tools of the trade if you actually wanted to do it. Also, a bunch of the things you have said requires unlocking the android bootloader and obtaining root privileges. You can do that to a large extent for ios, Apple it just more competent about shutting it out than other companies.
They want a cyber deck, except good and useful and apple hardware.
I often find myself wondering why these people aren’t happily using some Android rom and are instead using an iPhone.
And I do all of that on my Mac. My 4090 rig is strictly for gaming with my son and my Proxmox Linux retired thin client rigs are for running my household on HA.
Please tell me what I'm missing out on by using a Mac OS device as my daily driver.
If you read the rest of this thread you'll see specific examples others point out.
So, I feel like I routinely experience what we are talking about in this sub-thread. Given a few VPS’s to ssh/mosh into for programming and a keyboard and mouse, this is a workable setup.
The one thing that always gets me to unpack my MacMini and set it up is that even with 16G shared memory on a iPadPro, I can only run local models in a chat-style app. On macOS, my LLM use is mostly embedded in experimental scripts and apps.
(which would mitigate a lot of security risks by itself. I also note that people seem to do fine with desktop OSes, despite their outdated security models)
Also, a working foss ecosystem.
I'm pretty sure battery performance would drop significantly if root was too easy to achieve. The temptation to run "that one more background service" would be far too much for most apps, both free and otherwise.
To get good battery perf out of a device, you need to be extremely good at saying "no", even if that "no" comes at the expense of user freedom and features. Free software is usually extremely bad at this by design, although there are exceptions (Graphene OS comes to mind).
On Apple devices, core system services are written by Apple itself. That puts pressure on the software development side to care about battery perf, as that is what users want (and what increases sales). If software is written by 3rd parties with their own business goals unrelated to device sales, I'm afraid "featuritis" and lower development costs would win out over efficiency, as it usually does in such circumstances.
No offense, but this is one of the most absurd things I have ever read on a hackernews discussion.
I bet if I could get root on iOS I would get even better battery life as I kill off services related to iCloud and other background processes I don’t want running.
> To get good battery perf out of a device, you need to be extremely good at saying "no", even if that "no" comes at the expense of user freedom and features.
There is zero evidence that this is the case. In fact saying “no” to root allows more services and things running on the device than I may want.
Also, iPhones have 20% smaller batteries for the same battery life, but there could be multiple reasons (maybe combined even) for this.
I would assume that an iPhone has similar amounts of unwanted background apps and would also be able to gain battery life instead of losing it if rooted. Obviously if you install spyware, you lose a lot of battery life. Funnily enough, I remember that a few years ago, people were surprised to find that uninstalling facebook increased battery life because it behaved much like spyware.
When you just have to focus on a handful of hardware platforms and when you own the hardware and software, this becomes much, much easier.
Well, except Android :P
My phone runs AOSP that I compile myself. I can go change the source code to do whatever I want (and I do). It's pretty cool that that's possible IMO
Sure, iOS is certainly restrictive, fully locked-down, app store only etc etc, and I'd love a full-fat firefox with its plugin system available on my phone. But what are you doing on a non-Mac laptop that you can't do on an M1 mac?
I'm a big fan of linux and have used it as a main machine for many years, but use an M4 macbook as my daily driver at the moment (everyone else I work with does too, it's just easier). I haven't felt limited at all. I can build and install whatever I like, I have brew for my tooling needs...
Yeah I don't see it with Mac. Unless you're actually needing linux and dockerisation won't cut the mustard I guess.
You also get nice eBPF tools.
It's more "where are the barriers/locks?" that I was interested in
I help sysadmin a few hundred servers, and given the choice I went with a MacBook because Terminal and SSH was good enough to admin stuff. MacOS is also pretty good with the business-y apps I have to deal with at times.
A colleague went with a x86 and installed Ubuntu on it, and has regular issues with audio (Google Meeting, Zoom, etc).
At a previous I had a Linux workstation and a Windows laptop, but with hybrid/remote I 'combined the two' into a Apple laptop.
- The user interface and UX is pretty and all[1], but doesn't quite work as I'd like and I can't really do much beyond a few limited "hacks". Switching workspaces has a horrible and annoying animation I can't turn off. All applications windows are grouped together and for example some actions cause all of them to jump to the top. Top-level shortcuts are limited and I can't do the same things I can on Linux - eg, I bind Super+Enter to open a new terminal window, on MacOS I can kind get a janky version of that, but due to how the window manager works, it not as streamlined as Linux
- The whole notarization stuff and signing - I mean okay, security, great. But it's annoying and you have to pay Apple like $100(?) a year just for the privilege of developing software for their platform. When I did desktop app dev on MacOS, I had to do `xattr com.apple.quarantine` commands to turn off the security nonsense that prevented me from running our own app I or my coworkers wanted to test locally.
tldr; I just like Linux, it works, it's slick, I can turn-on/off, add/remove whatever I want. I'm not restricted to what some company thinks my workflow should look like.
[1]: I'm leaving out the white elephant that is the latest "glass UI" changes... what a horribly silly thing that is.
It's absolutely fine to have personal preferences on UX, customisability etc. This is why I swore off GNOME at the Gnome 3 transition and have never looked back, for example. If it doesn't work for you it doesn't work for you.
But it doesn't really support the assertion that you can't use the power of an M1 because of "how locked down everything is and most of that power is pretty useless".
Again, not trying to say "Thou shalt love MacOS!" just that I don't think your points there really reflect something so locked down as to be useless. Just something with a UI you don't get along with.
People can use whatever they want. They're adults. I don't wanna debate. I just shared my random opinions.
If I had the choice, since I have a free Macbook laying around right now, I'd slap Linux on it and be happy - unfortunately doesn't look like Asahi Linux is quite ready yet for me to do so, few missing things. I ran Linux on a Intel Macbook (which I also didn't purchase, was given to me) for all of university and I was a happy camper.
That being said, would I buy a Mac voluntarily - nope. I'd rather buy a Thinkpad, install Linux, and I'm set for a decade honestly.
I'm only taking you to task on the "locked down" assertion.
Skipping the "handheld" bit of this just for a second. You can run an (almost entirely) open stack on your hardware, and do so on an i9/9800X3D with 256GB RAM, 5080, and MultiTB of NVMe storage.
But it doesn't realy matter for 95% of users, because the hardware is already way faster than they need and the bottlenecks are on the server side and on shitty software architecture. I have an i9 with 128GB RAM for work, and Excel still takes 30+ seconds to load, Teams manages to grind the entire thing to a halt on startup, slack uses enough memory to power a spaceship... Running those apps on my desktop is pretty much the same experience as running them on my 10 year old macbook.
Which spaceship though? Not sure spaceship is the model you're looking for, as all of the ones I'm familiar have had a very locked down limited amount of memory. Apollo had something like 4Kb of memory. The space shuttle had 1MB.
Slack often uses more memory than my IDE + compilers combined, to display the chat history of 60 people.
Yes, pretty much everyone on this forum is aware that any Electron app is going to use way more memory than actually necessary as a trade off for developing in that ecosystem.
In efforts to save the punchline - I would move to change 'a spaceship' to 'interstellar jump calculations' but I fear the actual ram required would also be small.
If it's a corporate device, it's usually some anti-virus abomination (or other security-related software) that steals 90% of the resources.
I'm almost certain that it's our Microsoft AD tenant.
Either way, kind of proves the point. We have plenty of power, the problem is <AD|antivirus|electron|PM touting their new UI overhaul>.
- Locked, proprietary bootloader with no guaranteed Linux support
- No official Vulkan drivers, DXVK broken without downstream patches (unlike every other GPU I own)
- Every Docker solution runs worse than WSL (somehow)
- macOS is genuinely intolerable, full-stop
I presume collaboration at work means some sort of remote mounting of filesystems -- is `brew install samba` bad in some way?
Re: ads - this is genuinely my complaint with Windows, but I thought I was getting a pretty ad-free experience in Mac, what am I missing?
I love using the MacBooks, but the OS just doesn't feel like it was designed for me, and that would be OK, but I have limited alternatives if I want all of the hardware to keep working.
Also, yes, gaming, but that's less important to me.
I don't even need GNU-freedom, regular MacOS is fine. I just can't live with a iPadOS anymore.
edit: you can pry locked down iOS from my cold dead hands. Love it exactly because it's a walled garden.
Start with a laptop, you believe they should be open.
Remove the keyboard so it's only a screen, you believe they should be opened.
Shrink that screen down, and now they should be locked down?
Why do the same restrictions bother them on a bigger screen is what I'm getting at.
What if the iPhone supported more traditional desktop resolutions when plugged into a display, you'd be staring at a screen with an Apple UI and more desktop/tablet like amounts of screen real estate. What of the walled garden then.
I would love plug-in display type functionality for my phone, but not at the expense of leaving the walled garden.
I sort of don't have to imagine, because somewhat viable options like this exist (eg. GrapheneOS). The issue there is that I'd still rather use a more polished handheld device (iOS) than jump ship and get those extra features.
And wondering what GrapheneOS would be like with all its power, plus the polish of iOS is pointless fantasy, because it likely won't ever happen.
My guess, based on experience, is that eventually, iOS's quality will degrade enough that I'll find Android or GrapheneOS more attractive.
Tbh, with the quality of the latest iOS I’m getting pretty close to that point. Looking at Ubuntu Touch right now.
Your M1 has supported Linux pretty well for years now… Install the Fedora Asahi Remix and give it a try.
It makes a lot of sense considering high end SoC are now more powerful than the M1.
I rarely use split screen mode on my Android phone but I am rather annoyed when I'm on iOS and I can't keep two apps open at the same time.
Some vendors do a much better job than others, though. Google in particular doesn't seem to offer more than the bare basics.
I'm always fascinated at the threshold where people will decide something just won't happen ("useless") because it's not comfortable enough.
I'm more in the camp of pushing the limits as far as technically possible if it means I'm neither walking around with a 13" screen at all time nor need to be home to be able to look at two things at the same time.
So I'll be fine with readjusting a bit the window to input text if it means I can do the thing now instead of 6 hours later. At least I don't want Google to kill the feature just because it requires working around some quirks.
It is my feet and my gun and it is up to me if I want to risk shooting the former with the latter.
I can't imagine trying to do that on an iPhone. Surely it's useless.
What this does do is reveal the fiction that "iPadOS" and "iOS" are separate. Clearly not.
Not saying you are wrong, this may be the reason Apple operates nowadays, but I maintain it is shortsighted.
Replacing the MacBook + iPad with an iPhone + some dock accessories might reduce revenue per customer.
Two bits floating in my mind: I'm in management (different sector, totally different scale) and deciding to move forward against a market as a market leader is a really scary decision. We did and changed our proposition against a trend in the market. The market mostly followed our lead. Thats what we hoped for, but sure couldn't count on at the time of the decision. So we had to make sure to have all stakeholders involved in the risk - What if most of our customers just left? Then suppose you are in management for Apple. The stakes are massive. How would you communicate this shift?
The other one is: You should take the strength of your opposition into account when making bold moves. Android / Google / the brands fabricating the products I would say (no need for the old debate) are market followers. They are good at following and produce more technical diverse products, minus the margins. If you do not expect your opposition to make the bold move first, but do expect them to follow your bold move, I would argue you should be less likely to play bold moves unless you know they cannot follow you. So game theory I think also favors the status quo for Apple.
Only for the truly low end. The thermals alone are a serious difference, you can't expect an iPad-class device to support the same power dissipation as a legit MacBook.
They're not doing it today because current Apple leadership doesn't have the same incisiveness as the one back when they were sacrificing their most successful product on the iPhone altar so the competition can't. And to be fair, Apple has a much stronger position with a wider moat then they did back then. So they can afford to give more time to the competition to compete.
Apple wouldn't just sacrifice the entry-level MacBook product category and I'm not even sure about that - the look-and-feel of a "display with attached keyboard" (i.e. Thinkpax X1 Tablet-style) is vastly different from a bottom-heavy Macbook with actual hinges. The former isn't really usable as a literal laptop unless you got some seriously long upper legs.
The more important thing that Apple would have to sacrifice is the App Store cash cow and users not having root rights. On a iPad or iPhone I'm willing to accept that, but on a machine I actually want to do work? No way in hell.
The iPad Pro with Magic Keyboard is just that and in my personal experience does very well even on shorter legs due to its weight distribution. Were Apple to go down the route of actually enabling Xcode, etc. on iPads, they'd likely invest a bit more into the ergonomics of course, but they are already there and not comparable to Lenovos efforts in that regard.
Xcode is huge, it’s bigger than most games. A lot of that size, is an aggregation of tools, built up over a couple of decades.
Replacing it with a rewrite, would be a major operation, but would probably be required, in order to work on iPad.
But that's it right here. It just takes boiling the frog slowly enough. The high powered M-powered iPads are already testing the waters of what people will accept for work (I don't think they're aimed purely at content consumption like the "smaller" iPads). I think Apple can afford to wait because they don't need to cannibalize anything today, and because the replacement isn't strictly a superset of what it's replacing, it comes with caveats. As soon as the market is ready to tolerate more lock-in, it might happen.
Enough people do just emails/Teams/Office for work so plugging in an iPhone and turning it into a desktop with mouse, keyboard, and external screen(s) can tick all the boxes for usability. Most work devices are locked down anyway, no root, no software installation.
Besides, they've increasingly been expanding iPadOS to have more desktop-like features, so it wouldn't be far-fetched to offer full-blown macOS on these devices. It's not a hardware issue at all at this point.
The more people that file, the more likely it is to happen.
I don't see why we cannot build an app that when connected to an external monitor switches to a "Desktop Environment". Maybe, even a hacked version of UTM[1] that exposes a fully functional OS on the monitor.
[0] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/presenting-c...
[1] https://github.com/utmapp/UTM
When there's a will you'll be glad there's a way.
People used to make do with "tiny" screens throughout the 1980s and 1990s: Bigger displays sure but smaller resolutions Han the iPhone. Doom came out in 320x200 ffs
When traveling I've had to do all sorts of tricks to use various services while away from home. Like my bank app which set an OTP to email or SMS, but if you swiped out of the app to go check the message, it would generate a new OTP when you switched back to the bank app. So I had to check my mail/messages on the minuscule Apple Watch screen. And that was the only time I ever used email on the Watch but I was infinitely glad that it had that option.
Technically, I don’t think anybody ever claimed they were 100% distinct. Apple, for instance, says (https://developer.apple.com/ipados/get-started/): “Powered by the iOS SDK, your iPadOS apps”, and they’ve touted the ability to build apps that ru on both iPhone and iPad.
marketing-wise, they clearly are separate, in the same sense as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_platform: “A car platform is a shared set of common design, engineering, and production efforts, as well as major components, over a number of outwardly distinct models and even types of cars, often from different, but somewhat related, marques.”
The only difference is that here, Apple apparently ships all or major parts of the special parts for the iPad on iOS, too. Maybe they also do that vice versa? Can you enable the calculator app on iPad with this method?
Screen isn't much bigger than an iPhone Pro Max, if at all, but I was able to adapt to the desktop GUIs without much trouble.
Why?
So that's still BS.
Closest thing you can get now is that they finally brought the dialer app to the iPad... I can sort of make calls now through my cellular iPad using my iPhone's voice account with the "wifi calling on other devices" feature.
I've been hoping Apple will get eventually around to work this out, and the article shows it'd be easier than anticipated. I think it'll happen eventually.
As for travelling specifically, it'd be easier to bring a MacBook than to bring a mouse and keyboard and portable display. The display could be replaced by a TV in your acommodation, but it's rare to be able to use that ergonomically.
It'd be instead quite interesting in general for people who already only use little more than the browser.
I don’t even want touch to work on the iPad running macOS. Just let me run my own input hardware against it.
I don’t find many of these features useful on my iPad (to be fair, my Mini is my daily iPad), let alone, my iPhone. I can’t see myself doing all that work, for features I don’t want to use.
11 more comments available on Hacker News