Only using the iPad as my main machine, review for software development experience

2 min readJul 3, 2022

I’ve been using the iPad exclusively as my main computing machine since June 2022. (This post is, of course, written on my iPad.)

Before then, I relied heavily on a Macbook Pro 13-inch at my previous office and didn’t have my home computer for the last two years after I gave my old home computer to my friend’s son who wanted to study online.

I do serious software development with Python, Typescript, Kotlin, Golang, and Rust. And thus, I was wondering if I could do serious web development with the iPad.

After a quick online research, I found that even programming is possible on the iPad with its keyboard and creative touch-screen activities. So, I bought and tried using the iPad for light development and learning experience.

Spec Details

11-inch iPad Pro Wi-Fi 128G
Magic Keyboard (Not Smart keyboard)

The 13-inch screen was a bit too heavy to carry, and Smart Keyboard was too thin for a heavy typing workload.

What happened in the first month?

1st week: programming is impossible!! Just watch Youtube!
2nd week: a code fix is possible, but no serious dev.
3rd week: entire software dev works with cloud IDEs and cloud services! AWS, GCP, Gitpot!

Pros

Stateless! No dependency and data are left in the local computer!
It is so lightweight that I can be anywhere with it! I flew to a couple of vacation places and enjoyed coding at hotels and cafes.
The touch screen is terrific when you want subtle maneuvers or interactively show the screen to your friends.

Cons

Need to know alternative tricks to local machine development.

No terminal (use virtual machine such as ec2 and gce)
No local Git (use cloud machine or Working Copy)
Limited local IDEs (Gitpod, Stackblitz, Code Server)

Overall

Coding is definitely possible
Serious software development is mainly limited to the cloud environment. You may bear with its dev inconvenience in exchange for lightweight convenience.
Not recommended for beginners. It is better to learn computer basics with standard computers.

Cloud IDE articles

A guide to writing code on an iPad

We tried 10 online code editors

Originally published at https://dev.to on July 3, 2022.