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By default, the app doesn’t monitor anything on its own you always have to activate clipboard monitoring yourself by interacting with a menu that requires three taps. Best of all, it does so with controls embedded in the Picture in Picture video overlay that even let you customize how Yoink checks for the contents of the clipboard.įirst of all, it’s important to stress that Yoink’s persistent clipboard monitoring can only be manually activated by the user. Specifically, Yoink uses Apple’s Picture in Picture technology to remain active even if you close the app, monitor what you copy, and save it into the main Yoink app. Yoink’s persistent clipboard monitoring is a new spin on an old concept: it uses an audio/video trick to let the app run in the background and make iOS/iPadOS think it’s always in the foreground, capable of capturing your clipboard. But after I saw that Apple itself was promoting Yoink in apps ‘Hot This Week’ on the App Store, I knew it was game on.

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I resisted the temptation of writing about Yoink’s genius implementation of clipboard monitoring because I didn’t want to shine a spotlight on a feature that could (potentially) put the app at risk in case its update was approved by a reviewer who didn’t pay particular attention to it. Without a reliable API and officially sanctioned framework to make apps run uninterrupted in the background and capture the contents of the clipboard, this category of apps must have felt like a market that Apple just didn’t want to exist on iOS and iPadOS.

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The truth is that clipboard managers for iPhone and iPad have never been as reliable and seamless as their Mac counterparts, which explains why searching for ‘clipboard manager’ on the App Store reveals a wasteland of abandonware these days. I’ve never been a fan of this method: if I have to remember to stop what I’m doing and open the Today page for a chance at capturing what’s in my clipboard, I might as well just open the clipboard manager manually, paste it myself, and rest assured I’ve archived whatever is in my clipboard. We’ve seen different permutations of this feature in apps such as Clips, Copied, Paste, and other clipboard managers that have come and gone over the years. Unable to devise other methods to let apps run in the background without interruptions, developers of clipboard managers then converged on the same idea: using old-school Today widgets to capture the contents of the clipboard as soon as the user opened the Today page.

The feature was promptly shut down by Apple. Several years ago back when Pastebot was also available on iPhone, Tapbots attempted to let it run persistently in the background by playing a silent audio track that would trick iOS into not suspending Pastebot when it was closed. There is a long history to third-party developers trying all sorts of workarounds to circumvent the limitations imposed by Apple on clipboard managers. It’s almost too good to be true, and I hope I won’t cause any trouble by writing about it. The result is unlike anything else I’ve seen on iOS and iPadOS, and it unlocks the kind of flexibility and peace of mind I’ve long missed from macOS.

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So, using a clever workaround made by possible by new APIs introduced in iOS and iPadOS 15, he figured out how to turn Yoink – already a capable and modern clipboard manager and shelf app – into a “true” clipboard manager that, like those you may have seen on macOS, can monitor everything you copy and automatically save it for you.

While I continue to believe Apple will have to address these issues in the next iterations of iPadOS, Matthias Gansrigler didn’t want to wait for Apple to let his clipboard manager Yoink run continuously in the background and automatically capture anything the user copies to the system clipboard. Despite the advances in the past 18 months with iPadOS 14, the Magic Keyboard, and iPadOS 15, there are still several areas where iPadOS falls short: I can’t record podcasts on it with the setup I like (unless I deal with some ridiculous cable shenanigans) the Files app still lacks Finder features such as smart folders or the ability to navigate into hidden folders and, due to Apple’s restrictions, iPad utilities like clipboard managers can’t run persistently in the background like they can on a Mac. In the years I’ve spent working on iPad as my primary computer, I’ve learned to appreciate the platform’s advantages over the Mac (a richer app ecosystem and superior modularity, for instance), and I’ve accepted its limitations. Yoink’s new persistent clipboard monitoring.

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