Multiple instances of Pleco on iPad?

T

tangerine2468

Member
Pleco is the the only productivity app in my workflow that isn't capable of having multiple instances of it open on iPad.

I find having multiple instances of an app to be an extremely useful feature on iPadOS, especially in tandem with screen splitting. For example I'd like to have a web browser split with Pleco's dictionary in one window, a flashcard set split with a note taking app in another window, and a reader instance split with a drawing app in another window (or multiple instances of all of these individual things for different card sets / reader documents, etc).

This workflow is analogous to what I do on my computer, where my virtual desktops have applications open on them for each topic, one for work, one for study, one for hobbies, etc.

I appreciate that Pleco has the ability to pop-over the menu and switch in a single instance between various functions, but this doesn't gel too well with having different workspaces set up and ready to go for different purposes. Unfortunately now it takes a lot of manual window manipulation to make this workflow possible, and I've come to use Pleco for pretty much only 1 thing at a time, and downgraded to using an external PDF reader instead of the (really excellent) Pleco reader for certain tasks where I've got a lot going on at once.

I did see this thread discussing the same 3 years ago. I thought I'd bring the topic up again since it's been a while.

Is it possible to get this feature added? I realize there might be a lot of development time involved, especially if the app wasn't designed for this use case initially. I for one would be very willing to purchase this feature or contribute monetarily towards the development of this feature... Like I described, it's pretty integral to my personal workflow and based on how I've seen other people use their iPads for productivity, it is for many others as well.
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
tangerine2468 said:
Is it possible to get this feature added? I realize there might be a lot of development time involved, especially if the app wasn't designed for this use case initially. I for one would be very willing to purchase this feature or contribute monetarily towards the development of this feature... Like I described, it's pretty integral to my personal workflow and based on how I've seen other people use their iPads for productivity, it is for many others as well.
Click to expand...

Honestly, thus far we haven't seen enough interest in this to justify investing the time in it. (which is indeed substantial - we got a good bit of the way to implementing it before realizing it was a massive hornet's nest and would require a lot more work to get it running well without all sorts of horrible subtle bugs)

Just in general, it's very hard to add a lot of labor-intensive features for iPad when a) it's a small (and shrinking!) portion of our users and b) we aren't currently able to charge for it separately. (charging for something like this as its own add-on is a big no-no - Apple is fine with charging for a separate iPad app, but they strictly forbid charging people for access to a system-provided feature like multi-instance support) We've actually added quite a few features like mouseover for our Mac app which work perfectly well on iPad too, but we're not yet sure if or how to offer them on iPad because if we do we find ourselves in the awkward position of having an app that's like 98% identical on both Mac and iPad but which we charge for on Mac and give away for free on iPad.

While it's not possible to remove iPad support altogether from our existing app, there's no reason it has to be particularly nice or optimized - it isn't now! - so one thing I have been considering is whether in conjunction with our Mac app we might launch a separate iPad-only version of Pleco which is much better iPad optimized and requires some sort of additional purchase (as the Mac version will - this may possibly be the same purchase, in fact). So that might provide a path for us to eventually add multi-instance support.

(one other thing that would help here is if some combination of the EU Digital Markets Act and the US Open App Markets Act force Apple to allow sideloading of iPad apps - if that comes to pass, we could ignore that pesky Apple guideline and offer a single Pleco app with paid iPad enhancements as a sideloading exclusive)
 
Fernando

Fernando

榜眼
To be honest I don’t think the plan to charge for a more feature-rich iPad app can fly. As you said yourself Mike, iPad users are a shrinking portion of your user base. I am one of those users, but the only reason I use Pleco on an iPad is because it is not on desktop yet. Except for the cheapest model iPads are a very bad value proposition, and that’s because iPadOS is still a toy OS, so I do wonder how many of those expensive iPad Pros Apple is selling and what kind of people is buying them. Artists or rich execs perhaps, in any case not Pleco users. Macs are way better for productivity with text, and I think those who go for the $300 iPad for whatever reason are very unlikely to be willing to pay to “upgrade” an app like Pleco.
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Fernando said:
To be honest I don’t think the plan to charge for a more feature-rich iPad app can fly. As you said yourself Mike, iPad users are a shrinking portion of your user base. I am one of those users, but the only reason I use Pleco on an iPad is because it is not on desktop yet.
Click to expand...

This is actually what I'm expecting / counting on - charge for the features regardless of whether you're using them on iPad or Mac. Most of the development work overlaps; it's basically just about avoiding the weird situation where somebody gets a free iPad app that's so good that they're dissuaded from buying the Mac app. And if nobody buys either one then I can refocus on phone apps and not get distracted by Windows or by Android 12L.
 
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