I expect that this will continue, at least as much as it's possible to do so when how we interact with the mobile apps is taken into consideration. Lightroom for the iPad, iPhone and Android devices was and likely never will be an alternative to Lightroom Classic. To date, the mobile apps have largely followed the feature set, workflow, etc of Lightroom Desktop.

If Adobe tried to make Lightroom Classic for iPad OS today, under the limitations of iPad OS and the constraints of a touch UX, it would probably look and work at lot like the existing ground-up rewrite of Lightroom for iPad that they already did. But that seems very unlikely for now, largely because of the ways that iPad OS does not support everything that macOS does. What’s left, is to wonder how likely it is that Adobe would completely rewrite Lightroom Classic for iPad OS. So we cannot expect, any time soon, to be able to run the Apple Silicon Mac version of Lightroom Classic on iPad OS without modification. All of the hopeful speculation for Mac software on M1 iPad Pro never came true. Lightroom Classic is now optimized for M1 Apple Silicon, but…in the many months since the M1 iPad Pro was released, Apple WWDC came and went, the release of iOS 15 came and went, and still, Apple has done nothing and announced nothing to make it possible to run Mac software on an M1 iPad Pro. Yes, and it is interesting to revisit this post months later.

Lightroom classic on ipad