Apple’s M1 iPad Pro is a beast of a tablet, but for some reason, it was discovered that Apple was capping apps at 5GB of RAM. This means that even with the iPad Pro’s 16GB of RAM, apps can only take advantage of a third of it at a time, which was a bit disappointing as it could have unlocked the door to a lot more potential.However, it seems that with iPadOS 15, Apple will be changing that. With the upcoming release of the update, Apple will be giving developers the option to allow their apps to access more than 5GB of RAM. According to Apple, these changes will let developers “inform the system that some of your app’s core features may perform better by exceeding the default app memory limit on supported devices.”
It is possible that Apple had always intended to increase the limit but was waiting for iPadOS 15 to do so. This is because prior to the new iPad Pro, Apple’s iPads only came with 6-8GB of RAM, so actually capping apps to 5GB made sense, plus 5GB out of 6-8GB was actually rather generous when you think about it.
In any case, the onus now is on developers to let their apps take advantage of the iPad Pro’s RAM, so whether or not that affects the apps you use remains to be seen, but this is a good thing.