alt Hacker News> I wouldn’t be surprised at all if next year they dissolve the iPhone/iPad distinction on the App Store altogether
I hadn't thought about it but it makes sense and it makes me wonder how far this would reach throughout the rest of the OS. If the iPhone can fold out into an iPad Mini, will it get the rest of the iPadOS features? The iPad used to run iOS but they rebranded the version that runs on iPad to iPadOS to distinguish that it has a handful of unique features only for big screens, mainly pertaining to multitasking. But if the line is being blurred and iPhones will have big screens with multitasking, will they go back to just calling it iOS on all mobile devices?
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I think they’re going to continue to make some features device-specific. They probably want to position the foldable iPhone as a midway compromise device rather than a full iPad and flagship iPhone replacement, targeting customers who prefer breadth over depth and capability when it comes to features.
You're just arguing about marketing. Apple has moved to a One device, one OS dichotomy they will not rethink because the foldable iPhone gets a version of the iPad's multitasking. And engineering-wise, when they moved the naming to iPad OS, nothing changed behind the curtain. The iPad still runs the same codebase it did before the marketing switch. They didn't fork anything.