Google updated its Docs and Sheets productivity apps on Tuesday to support the iPad Pro's larger screen resolution. As you might recall from our iPad Pro review, iOS apps that don't properly support Apple's guidelines for resolution-independent apps will look stretched out and slightly blurry on an iPad Pro, much like an iPhone 5 app would look larger and blurry on an iPhone 6.
The problem, as pointed out by MacStories and elsewhere, is that the apps still don't support the Split View multitasking features Apple introduced in iOS 9 when it was announced in June and released in September. This is especially noticeable because productivity apps are the best fit for Split View multitasking—it just makes it easier to grab text and other data from one place and paste it down in another place when your apps are side-by-side. And it's not just Docs and Sheets that still haven't gone all-in on iOS 9. Few of Google's apps support Split View, and the YouTube app doesn't support the Picture-in-Picture multitasking mode either.
Google Chrome picked up iPad multitasking support back in October, so it's not as though Google doesn't recognize the benefits of the feature (the company is also taking advantage of new iOS 9 features to make the browser faster and more stable). It's just that Drive, YouTube, Docs, Sheets, Gmail, Inbox, and others, despite being actively maintained and updated with some frequency, still aren't supporting features that Microsoft and other big companies have already gotten behind. And as nice as it is to be able to use first-party Google apps with Google's services on the iPad, this sort of thing is frustrating for people who want to use their iPad or iPad Pro as their primary computing device.
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