A few months back, it was revealed that despite the iPad Pro coming with up to 16GB of RAM on the 1TB and 2TB models, app developers were unable to make use of the extra memory as iPadOS had limited apps to a maximum allocation of 5GB RAM regardless of how much RAM is left to use.
However, it looks as though this RAM limit has been increased in iPadOS 15. App developers are now able to get their apps to request up to 12GB of RAM on the iPad Pro, with the remaining 4GB of memory left for the operating system and background tasks. As for the 8GB models, the RAM limit has been tweaked to 6GB of RAM per app.
This is a pretty significant change as this lets the iPad Pro’s target demographic of power users and creatives do more on their apps. Apps like Procreate or Adobe’s suite of programs would function a lot smoother and have more functionality like more layers and projects with more memory allocated to them.
Procreate themselves had to make a statement back in May that their iPad app was only able to use up to 5GB of RAM due to the limitations of iPadOS, and not of their own. Now, with the new update, Procreate are looking to increase the RAM limit, which in turn means more layers and increase in canvas resolutions available.
If you’re an app developer who’d like to do this, you can simply add an entitlement to your app which lets the system know that it’d like more memory to let it perform better. Apple does state though that this is only available on some devices—likely referring to the iPad Pro with 8GB and 16GB RAM—and that you’ll first need to add a function that determines the overall memory available. For more details on this, you can check it out on the Apple Developer website.
