Spine Editor for IOS (iPad + Apple Pencil)

giuseppe

I have been doing quite a bit of painting and animation in Procreate, and animation in Procreate Dreams and I think Spine's editor would be a great addition to a mobile pipeline.

Procreate outputs PSDs so that is one program that would work well. I'd certainly take the movie output of Spine into Procreate Dreams too.

I think the iPad creative niche is quite popular enough to warrant an iOS build, would love to see it happen.

Giuseppe

Spinebot

Spine is primarily designed as a desktop productivity tool and currently, there are no plans to support iOS, including iPadOS. The development effort required to adapt Spine for iOS is significant due to the technical complexities and the need to redesign the user interface for touch input on smaller screens. Additionally, the market for such a version is considered too small to justify the investment.

giuseppe

Spinebot reply is tired imo. I have a 13 inch screen, i use apple pencil - it's no different to any display tablet and how I work on desktop.

Fact is I don't think the interface needs any redesigning at all. The market is actually quite strong at this point.

Misaki

giuseppe Thank you for sharing your thoughts! As you can see from the Related Discussions section, we have received similar requests in the past, such as using Spine on an iPad. Among them, Mario provided a more detailed response:
https://esotericsoftware.com/forum/d/27979-transpile-editor-to-ipados/3

As he explains, developing a mobile version of Spine would require substantial effort, and in addition, iOS specifications are likely to impose functional limitations. (While Spinebot specifically mentioned the need to redesign the user interface, the functional limitations extend beyond UI concerns.)

For this reason, our current priority is to further enhance the functionality of the desktop editor rather than creating a separate mobile edition.

giuseppe

Well, it's their loss really.

ErikS_in2D

A light version of Spine for the iPad would really be great! Bones, meshes, vertex weights, and a timeline on the go would be a nice addition. I work at my desk all day and it would be nice to set up a character rig outside on an iPad, then toss it back to the desktop for heavy lifting.

ToonSquid on iPad is trying to do this in their last update but it's not as streamlined as Spine's in my opinion. You can make png's into meshes, set bones and even do simple IK. But there's no way go in and alter the weight on vertices individually, which makes it difficult to use.

I wonder if instead of "Spine", you could market a much smaller version called "Vertebra" . In the way Adobe has junior versions of their apps on iOS?

giuseppe

I appreciate that their decision is their decision but for what it's worth, the UI thing is a load of rubbish when all of blender is coming to ipad.
https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/issues/142346

the fact that theyre doing it is enough proof that creative users are there.

The java thing is the real issue, and it's a shame really.

Mario

The UI thing is not a load of rubish. An iPad OS port would require a rewrite of large portions of the UI. If you read the details on the Blender issue, you'll see the exact set of problems. They too will have issue with e.g. extensions, which are written in Python, which does not run on iPad OS (without a lot of very hacky and possibly App Store policy breaking hacks). See here for more info:
https://code.blender.org/2025/07/beyond-mouse-keyboard/#mockups

Blender is non-commercial and as such can divert resources to such experimental projects, which may or may not work out. Esoteric Software is a business that needs to decide what resources are spent on to keep the lights on. And while an iPad OS port of Spine would be neat, it's currently not possible to divert resources to such an endevour, especially since it's unclear what the ROI is.

Java on iOS is not a problem. Ask me how I know 🙂
https://mobivm.github.io/

giuseppe

Its rubbish in that it needs redesigning for touch input like we're still on fingers and 9 inch screens, blender's interface is going over in full as-presented on desktop, is my point there.

The cost of this is what it is, and if i never see it then I won't be surprised - It's a substantial undertaking.

Personally if it were me and we were taking an ios version seriously, i'd be partnering with savage to start with and getting spine objects running in procreate dreams and building out its live puppetry workflows. as well as getting savage to do everything needed into procreate to fully support exporting to Spine.

Pretty huge procreate creative market there.

From there, i'd probably take blender seriously too, and partner there to work on some things.

Or languish i guess. Spine is at this point an extremely niche choice for game dev, for a start.

I'd jump into that ipad creative market, it's huge by comparison,

but thats me.

Harald

giuseppe Its rubbish in that it needs redesigning for touch input like we're still on fingers and 9 inch screens, blender's interface is going over in full as-presented on desktop, is my point there.

Perhaps there is some misunderstanding in the wording there. While it might not require throwing away 100% of the UI an re-doing everything differently, there are certain things which would be too inefficient or too badly arranged to tolerate for our quality standards. Where keyboard shortcuts are used on the desktop, other things like a pie menu could perhaps replace that on a pen input device. Note that Blender already has a pie-menu built-in, it often provides 3 ways to achieve the same goal - and in the end everyone just uses keyboard shortcuts as you're just being very inefficient otherwise.

As Mario mentioned, Blender developers can just release a bunch of experimental features with low quality at first and iterate over it for 3 years until it becomes usable, which is a path which EsotericSoftware will not go with Spine.