Standard iPad apps were increasingly designed to support the optional use of a physical keyboard. However, over time, the variant of iOS for the iPad incorporated a growing set of differentiating features, such as picture-in-picture, the ability to display multiple running apps simultaneously (both introduced with iOS 9 in 2015), drag and drop, and a dock that more closely resembled the dock from macOS than the one on the iPhone (added in 2017 with iOS 11). The operating system initially had rough feature parity running on the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad, with variations in user interface depending on screen size, and minor differences in the selection of apps included. This shared operating system was rebranded as ' iOS' with the release of iOS 4. The first iPad was released on January 10, 2010, and ran iPhone OS 3.2, which added support for the larger device to the operating system, previously only used on the iPhone and its smaller counterpart, the iPod Touch. The current public release is iPadOS 16.3, released on January 23, 2023. iPadOS was released to the public on September 24, 2019.

It was introduced as iPadOS 13 in 2019, reflecting its status as the successor to iOS 12 for the iPad, at the company's 2019 Worldwide Developers Conference. It was originally forked from iOS, the operating system used by Apple's iPhones, and given a new name to reflect the diverging features of the two product lines, particularly the iPad's multitasking capabilities.

IPadOS is a mobile operating system developed by Apple Inc. Proprietary software except for open-source components IPadOS 16 home screen running on an iPad ProĬ, C++, Objective-C, Swift, assembly language

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