I doubt that. Apple (and many others) have MacOS and iPadOS versions of certain apps, that is true. But the iPadOS versions are real iPadOS apps, not simply MacOS apps ported to iPadOS. They are optimized for touch, and do not rely on right mouse button clicks, just to name one major difference of these two OS-ses.
Very true. Simply porting the Lightroom Classic code to iPad OS would probably be the easy part. Having that pile of code be productive on iPad OS is the real challenge. The UI is a major problem. Some Lightroom Classic controls are so thin or tiny that they are easy to miss even on a Mac or PC with a high precision mouse, like resizing a side panel or hitting the sync icon…those controls are absolutely not usable with touch in their current form. And like Johan said, you can’t use computer gestures like right-clicks and hovers (unless supported when a mouse is connected to the iPad).
There is another issue. For the current Lightroom on iPad, one reason Adobe went with storage of masters on the cloud with Lightroom on the iPad is that iOS does not seem to support path-based referenced files, which are required for local storage of masters in Lightroom Classic. Even though the Files app appears to present hierarchical folders, I can’t think of an iPad app that lets you work with its files using paths. I don’t know the technical details behind this, but iOS seems to require all apps to use their own sandboxed storage that makes traditional path file referencing impossible.
That might explain why we have not (as far as I know) seen any iOS application that uses path-based file links on Mac/Windows, such as Adobe InDesign, Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe After Effects, Apple Final Cut Pro, QuarkXPress, etc. None have made it to iPad. Adobe has released Photoshop and Illustrator on iPad, but…they are cloud storage only, just like cloud Lightroom: When you open a file into iOS Photoshop or Illustrator it is always uploaded to the cloud (to Adobe Cloud Documents, which works like Lightroom Photos online). If you open a file from local iOS storage into iOS Photoshop or Illustrator, there is absolutely no way to avoid it being uploaded to the cloud and being edited from there from that point on…just like cloud Lightroom on iOS. Porting Photoshop and Illustrator to iOS did not preserve the ability to save their documents to any local folder.
Of course, I’m interested in whether any of those iOS restrictions will be lifted in iOS 15…if they are, we might hear about it at WWDC 2021 two days from now.
In short, If Lightroom Classic ever appears on iPad OS, it will require a
complete redesign, and the possible loss of several features that can’t be properly supported on iPad OS (Will plug-ins work? Publish services? Printing with profiles?). There is no guarantee that a user of Lightroom Classic on Mac/Windows will recognize or enjoy using an unavoidable total redesign of Lightroom Classic for iPad OS.
If the way things are in iOS 14 doesn't change soon, it’s more realistic to hope that the current Lightroom on iOS gains more Lightroom Classic features.