Webapp/IPad OS support

I’d like to start by apologizing if this has already been asked (multiple) times but I have spent the last 3 days trying to come up with a solution. I am trying to move away from a Mac/Windows based environment for work (it support) and the solution that makes the most (almost) sense to me is running my iPad Pro 2020 as a daily driver. The only drawback is the ability to create multiple Bootable drives On The Fly and I don’t see a solution supported by iPadOS. I typically carry one dedicated flash drive with me where I can create bootable drives for OSX or Windows, if needed but I don’t see any practical solution for this. I’ve done research on using parallels or VNC but they don’t seem to have usb support on the client side for this particular need. Does anyone have any input on this?
Questions like “why would you want to do this” or “why not just use your Mac” are not helpful.

To clarify the question you are asking: you specifically want to write boot images to flash media using the iPad?

Exactly. I typically will write several different variants of OS X on a weekly basis. I run a repair shop and installing OS X from scratch is a common thing. This is obviously when internet recovery doesn’t work…which is often…

Hi @Nullmoose and welcome to the balena forums!

Just to clarify a bit, are you trying to run Etcher specifically on your iPad/via a web browser?

Yes. Or any utility for that matter, that is capable of writing boot images from iPadOS. I dont know if the is possible through a web app (browser extension maybe?) I know google chrome uses chromium to create their bootable recovery devices for their chromebook models…But there doesn’t seem to be an open source solution.

I’ve personally never seen anything that has the ability to write to raw media from iOS, at all. Sorry.

+1! It would be great to see Etcher on iPadOS/iOS devices; this is something I’d like for my workflow as well, but I think as @crbn60 mentions there is no facility to gain access to storage devices connected via USB at the low level required. At least not last time I checked. Hopefully one of the lovely Etcher team will chime in with more technical info :slight_smile:

We haven’t heard from balenaEtcher developers yet, but I have created a feature request in the GitHub repo, which can also be used for tracking progress / subscribing for notifications: