20.2 · Documents, scenes and windows on iPad
An iPad app is not a big iPhone app. It lives in resizable windows, opens many documents at once, and is expected to behave like a small computer. Input and multitasking mechanics are in the UIKit topic; this section is about the app model.
Mental model. On iPad the scene is the unit of the user’s work: each window is its own scene with its own state, and a document is its own window.
Documents and scenes
Document-based apps, multiple windows and scene-based state.
- How do document-based apps and multiple scenes work on iPad, and how should state be organised?
On iPad (and Mac and visionOS) the user can open several windows of your app, side by side or on different Stage Manager canvases. The system models each…
More in Multiplatform Apple
- 20.1 · Shared cores, platform conditions, capabilities, and the release train
- 20.3 · Catalyst, native AppKit and SwiftUI on the Mac, and the Mac’s sandbox and menus
- 20.4 · The focus engine, the remote and the 10-foot UI, and media-first apps
- 20.5 · Input and battery, on-watch health and networking, and the dual-target setup
- 20.6 · Windows, volumes and immersive spaces
- 20.7 · What the compiler and the runtime say about each platform
- 20.8 · The Mac sandbox, signing, bookmarks, menus and Catalyst, measured
- 20.9 · Which scenes, modifiers and spaces exist where, and how a package declares them