There’s more in Apple’s current software than we’ve had to work with in years. iPadOS 26 finally gave the iPad a proper windowing system. Apps are resizable the way you’d expect. There’s a macOS-style menu bar. Stage Manager now runs on every supported iPad, not only the M-series models. That changes what a creative tool can be on an iPad. A photo editor no longer has to behave like a phone app stretched larger. It can sit next to a reference image, share state with a notes app, and actually feel like a tool.
Then there is the hardware. Apple Silicon is genuinely fast for image and video work. Metal handles heavy GPU tasks without needing a server in the loop. The Apple Pencil has enough precision and pressure range that drawing tools can feel close to the real thing. Photographers are already carrying iPads around on shoots. A lot of designers spend every working hour on a Mac anyway. We don’t have to convince anyone to switch hardware to try what we’re making.
Being honest about the tradeoff, the biggest one is exclusion. If you’re on Android, Windows, or Linux, none of our tools are available to you right now. There’s also Apple’s role as gatekeeper. App Store review can be slow and sometimes baffling. The rules can shift. We pay a $99 developer fee every year to distribute tools we give away for free. And there are things the OS simply won’t let us do. Some hardware access is locked off to third parties, background processing gets killed when Apple decides it should, and a few of the APIs we’d want to use exist only on paper so far.
On the web, almost none of that would be true. We could ship whatever we wanted and update it by pushing to a server. There are tools and projects that we consider worth exploring as web applications over on-device, local applications.
Building across three or four platforms means compromising on all of them. You design for the lowest common denominator, strip out the specific features that make each platform interesting to build on, and the result is usually a tool that runs everywhere and feels like nowhere in particular. We’ve used plenty of those. They’re fine. We want to make things that feel like they belong somewhere.
For now, somewhere means two things for us. Either Mac running macOS, an iPad on iPadOS, an iPhone on iOS, or it’s a tool focused on web technologies and runs in your browser. Some of these tools will probably make it to other platforms eventually. The ideas behind them aren’t Apple-specific, even if the current builds are. But expanding reach isn’t the goal right now. Making something actually worth using is.
From a personal perspective, we believe that great software should be used on great hardware, and there is no other company like Apple…