Universal Catalyst or Mac Apps

[MacHiavelli]

If a developer already offers an iOS app and a Mac app, do you think that they should (like Apple is doing with many of its own apps) just create one iOS app in the future and then use it through Catalyst as a universal app on Macs?

This gives one development stream, one design for users to learn, one app to support, and one app to regularly and easily update.

I like the idea of one app that works everywhere, especially if it syncs across platforms on iCloud.

 

[Ritsuka]

Catalyst right now is not Mac-like at all. It's just UIKit running on macOS. And while iPad and macOS apps UI might be similar, it's hard to scale the same UI from the iPhone to a 5k display, so the developers will still need to have a different UI on different platforms.

Right now AppKit is still the best way to make a Mac app. In the future SwiftUI will allow developers to reuse many UI views elements between platforms.

But it will always be impossible to automatically scale a UI from a 5" screen to a 27" and still call it a good UI.

 

[MacHiavelli]

Thanks. Only have 15” MBP, and apps like News and Stocks look fine on that. I’d be happy to have most iOS apps on my MBP and would be ok if the native Mac apps disappeared. But can see that some features might be lost. Though that would be a price worth paying to have the benefit of a universal app.

 

[Superhai]

Though that would be a price worth paying to have the benefit of a universal app.

It is very much up to the developer. If the app already are on both, the developer may use the time saved by only maintaining one codebase to differentiate the UI, so it is a win-win. But he or she might also choose to just add the compilation option without any optimisation or added UI/UX features. I would think that in most cases that would only be for apps that only existed on iOS. In the long run I believe the benefits are more than the disadvantages. Especially for paid apps it is important for end users to voice dissatisfaction if a developer goes the easy route.

 

[MacHiavelli]

Thanks. I guess SwiftUI is the end goal here. Change does seem to be coming.