So I am planning on buying an ipad, never owned one before. I have always been an android guy and from what I have heard Ipad os or ios is pretty restrictive in nature so I was wondering how much does it hamper the piracy experience. For example on android I can torrent files of any nature or size without any restrictions and sideload the apk's of paid apps to enjoy them for free, can I still do all this on an ipad or should I just drop the idea and get an android tablet instead ?
I sideload apps on my ipad pro, but as others have stated, it's nowhere near as straightforward as doing so on Android. I mainly decided to do it after my wife continued to spend $$ on "coins" and "gold bars" for Candy Crush on her ipad. It was cheaper for me to buy a developer account and sideload modded versions that have unlimited coins, etc. She's stuck in the apple ecosystem, even though I did try giving her and Android tablet to try out.
If you decide to try sideloading on IOS devices, and you spend the $99 for a developer account, I recommend using Sideloadly or something like Altstore to sideload apps to your device vs. a service that requires you to provide your certificates from your developer account to attach it to their ecosystem. Maybe some are legit and won't compromise your developer account credentials, but I prefer standalone tools that I self host, for security reasons. They are more work thought.
A compromise might be to use a services like Singulous that sells you a "slot" on a developer account for $10-20. The problem with those is they periodically get revoked and your sideloaded apps must be reloaded. For more info, you might look at reddit /r sideloaded.
Best of luck!