Third-Party Devs Will Be Able to Access iPadOS Apple Pencil Latency Improvements for Art Apps

Apple in iPadOS introduced some performance improvements between the iPad Pro and the Apple Pencil, cutting latency from 20ms to 9ms with the new software.

Third-party developers who make apps that use the Apple Pencil will also be able to take advantage of some of these latency improvements, Apple software development chief Craig Federighi confirmed last week.

Federighi shared the information in a response to an email sent by developer Claudio Juliano, who tweeted what Federighi had to say last week. The info was highlighted today in a tweet by developer Steve Troughton-Smith.

In the email, Federighi explains that third-party developers have had access to predicted touches via UIKit since iOS 9, and with iOS 13, developers will receive the “latest and greatest” touch prediction advancements in minimizing PencilKit drawing latency.

Federighi explains just how Apple introduced the latency improvements, and he points out that there’s a small gap of 4ms that developers won’t have access to at the current time because Apple didn’t have a way to safely expose the capability to developers. From Federighi’s email:

Note that we achieve low latency through a combination of several…