>using as a interactive screen for customers in retail shops.
This is precisely what we are using iPads for right now. Our clients and end customers are very comfortable using Apple hardware. The screen size on these devices is perfect for most interactions. If you have the device in landscape, it's about as wide as a 8.5x11" document at 1:1 scale.
Also, it is intuitive for most of our users to capture photos of documents or read barcodes using iPads. If I had to build this using USB webcams or even laptops with embedded webcams it would be far trickier from a UX perspective. Also, some of our clients have iPads with LTE connectivity so they can seamlessly go into the field and work with end customers who don't have time to come to them.
That said, the app development ecosystem around Apple is a fucking nightmare. Signing your apps, dealing with regressions after iOS major version updates, trying to do anything at all inside XCode, attempting to automate your builds, etc. This is why we are looking at supporting a wider range of devices heading into 2021 - Surface/Win10, Android, and PWA. IMO the holy grail is PWA, Apple just needs to give it better support (I am quite aware of why they do not want to). If we could somehow get everything working via PWA, we would immediately dumpster the iOS codebase and do the whole thing exclusively using Blazor server-side.
This is precisely what we are using iPads for right now. Our clients and end customers are very comfortable using Apple hardware. The screen size on these devices is perfect for most interactions. If you have the device in landscape, it's about as wide as a 8.5x11" document at 1:1 scale.
Also, it is intuitive for most of our users to capture photos of documents or read barcodes using iPads. If I had to build this using USB webcams or even laptops with embedded webcams it would be far trickier from a UX perspective. Also, some of our clients have iPads with LTE connectivity so they can seamlessly go into the field and work with end customers who don't have time to come to them.
That said, the app development ecosystem around Apple is a fucking nightmare. Signing your apps, dealing with regressions after iOS major version updates, trying to do anything at all inside XCode, attempting to automate your builds, etc. This is why we are looking at supporting a wider range of devices heading into 2021 - Surface/Win10, Android, and PWA. IMO the holy grail is PWA, Apple just needs to give it better support (I am quite aware of why they do not want to). If we could somehow get everything working via PWA, we would immediately dumpster the iOS codebase and do the whole thing exclusively using Blazor server-side.