Why aren’t all of Apple’s apps good iPad citizens? One thing I like to do on the iPad is pair 2 different apps in a workspace. For example, I wrote this post in a workspace with iA Writer and a Safari window side by side. I have another workspace with a Safari window and Apple Mail together, this way I can follow Mail links and see them right next to the email I’m reading. Of course this requires Safari to support multiple windows. But today I tried pairing Apple Music with another window and discovered that it does NOT support multiple windows on iPadOS. I then started looking at other Apple apps and there is a disturbingly long list, TV app, Music, Books, Find My, Photos, etc.
What’s going on here? This feature was introduced to iPadOS a few years ago now, yet many of Apple’s biggest apps still don’t support it? Is there something about this feature that makes it difficult to implement?
By Multiple windows, you mean (for example) 2 copies of Apple Music running in different windows, maybe even in different spaces?
I don’t think that Multi Window support is appropriate for all apps. I can completely see why Apple haven’t implemented it for Music, TV app, and Find My. What’s the realistic use case for multiple Windows using different views?
There also may be other technical issues around multi Window, e.g. Photos I can imagine all sorts of issues if you had two different views into the same data, especially if (like on macOS) the photos and metadata are stored in a package rather than a database.
For Books, I think that’s far less understandable. I could imagine working with multiple books or PDFs in different spaces. The same with Numbers which single window. At work I can easily have half a dozen spreadsheets open, why not on the iPad?
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OK, I was comparing the apps to what their Mac counterparts do. Music you can have a separate mini-player window and main window, but that’s it. Books, Find My, TV just one window. You can have multiple windows in Pages and Numbers on iPadOS just as on macOS, so maybe the difference is document based apps allow multiple windows, but media apps do not?