Strict sandboxing in the early version of iOS has caused issues with sharing molecular information between applications, chemists are very used to the idea of being able to copy and paste SMILES, or open sdf, mol files with multiple desktop applications. As iOS has evolved the strategies for sharing information have been implemented and this post on Molecular Materials Informatics has a brilliant summary of the current state of play.

Methods for sharing chemical data are described: iOS apps have many different ways to pass data in and out. Making use of the numerous different ways to exchange data is essential to making cheminformatics functionality useful on mobile devices.