Apple must open iPadOS to sideloading within 6 months, EU says

Personally I am surprised that IPad has its own OS. I thought it uses the same one as iPhone.

It is mostly just an iOS under the hood. Apple separated the iOS and iPadOS, saying that this way they can develop for it separate exclusive features. While we have things like multitasking and stage manager, mostly it’s been an excuse to bring iOS features to the iPadOS with a delay for a year.

> mostly it’s been an excuse to bring iOS features to the iPadOS with a delay for a year

On the contrary, mostly the iPad and iPad OS was the testbed for VisionOS UI management for years, ensuring that iPad apps (and app devs) had to implement support for arbitrary window shapes and layering, using the same affordances (more or less) as VisionOS, unlike iPhone apps that are stuck in portrait or landscape.

There's a lot of truth to AVP is an iPad strapped to your face, and if you have worked on iPad as professional daily driver for 5+ years and now own an AVP, you can remember aspects of VisionPro getting tested in the field over this time period.