Apple Confirms it is Bringing iOS Apps to the Mac
- Paul Thurrott
- Jun 04, 2018
-
62
Apple today admitted that it will do the obvious and bring iOS apps to the Mac. But not until 2019 at the earliest.
As you may recall, the first rumors that Apple would merge its iOS and macOS platforms appeared late last year. At the time, I opined that this was a great idea and that, if anything, they were moving too slowly given the dearth of Mac-specific apps.
Windows Intelligence In Your Inbox
Sign up for our new free newsletter to get three time-saving tips each Friday — and get free copies of Paul Thurrott's Windows 11 and Windows 10 Field Guides (normally $9.99) as a special welcome gift!
"*" indicates required fields
Apple, curiously, denied these rumors in April, with CEO Tim Cook stating that “if you begin to merge the two, you begin to make trade-offs and compromises.” But it turns out he was just pulling a Steve Jobs, that pesky liar.
During the WWDC keynote address today, Apple’s affable Craig Federighi admitted that Apple was indeed bringing iOS apps to the Mac. But he did so after a cute rhetorical question about Apple “merging” iOS and macOS. Which I don’t think anyone ever asked for or expected.
Whatever: The point is, Apple will bring iOS apps to the Mac and it will do so in a way that makes sense: In measured steps, as part of “a multi-year project” where the firm will work to map the Mac’s input methods—keyboard and trackpad—to work well with the mobile apps. It will test this functionality in-house only this year, and then bring it to external developers in 2019. If all goes well, this could appear in macOS as soon as September 2019, I guess.
“There are millions of iOS apps out there,” he said. “And some of them would be great on the Mac.”
Absolutely true. I’m just impressed it took them so long.
Conversation 62 comments
-
Stooks
<p>The big difference…..Apple will probably succeed where others have failed. Just the few apps announced today are great examples of how it should be done (news, Home etc.) PWA's are not needed, native FTW!</p><p><br></p><p>Google tried with the Chrome/Android stuff and it has largely been a fizzle/failure. Microsoft, with no mobile platform and…well….Windows 10S…..Windows 10 on ARM….no wait PWA's……Xbox One X!!!!! GitHub Baby!!!!!!!</p>
-
Stooks
<blockquote><a href="#281084"><em>In reply to Mikhul:</em></a></blockquote><p>Message.</p><p><br></p><p>Microsoft has a very bad message and it is impacting consumers and more importantly developers. For certain Microsoft is all in with the cloud for Enterprise and that really means subscription based models for the recurring revenue stream. After that cloud/sub message Microsoft is a complete mess and rapidly losing the faith of anyone outside of their cloud/enterprise customers.</p><p><br></p><p>Google is not far behind in terms of a un-focused message. Chrome and Android were going to merge into a new OS but maybe not. Google abandons projects more than any other company. What is the messaging platform that Google wants to use….Android messenger, Hangouts, Alo, Duo, this new super SMS they just announced? Is it Gmail or Inbox or wait the new Gmail? Is Chrome going to actually block ads or video from automatically playing at some point? What are they doing for media? Youtube, Youtube Red, Youtube Gaming, Youtube TV, Google Play music, Google Play video. As a consumer can you please make it more confusing?</p><p><br></p><p>In the meantime over in the Apple world/ecosystem, all of their components keep working better and better together and they are focused on the consumer and consumer privacy. </p>
-
skane2600
<blockquote><a href="#281073"><em>In reply to Stooks:</em></a></blockquote><p>Given the long (and complete) history of failure of WORE, I doubt Apple will achieve it either.</p>
-
skane2600
<blockquote><a href="#281096"><em>In reply to F4IL:</em></a></blockquote><p>Bringing iOS apps to the MacOS is a form of maintenance too. </p>
-
skane2600
<blockquote><a href="#281111"><em>In reply to F4IL:</em></a></blockquote><p>It seems you have different definitions of "maintenance" for Apple and Microsoft. </p>
-
skane2600
<blockquote><a href="#281136"><em>In reply to F4IL:</em></a></blockquote><p>I was referring to your claim that activity regarding Win32 "revolves mostly around maintenance" as if that somehow didn't apply to Apple and others as well. </p>
-
Stooks
<blockquote><a href="#281175"><em>In reply to JG1170:</em></a></blockquote><p>The only mind share Microsoft has for those under 30 is gaming. Honestly I bet a good 30-60% of Xbox gamers do not know that the Xbox is a Microsoft product. On the Windows side their strongest group of under 30 users are PC gamers. Even then it is just the OS on the box they built and every other piece of software on it it non-Microsoft. If PC game dev's fully supported Linux, Windows to consumer would quickly die.</p>
-
skane2600
<blockquote><a href="#281200"><em>In reply to Stooks:</em></a></blockquote><p>You and JG are in the same category: projecting your opinions on people the vast majority of which you don't know and have never met. </p>
-
skane2600
<blockquote><a href="#281175"><em>In reply to JG1170:</em></a></blockquote><p>You just make up whatever "facts" you like to bolster your opinion. I have kids well under 30 who use their Windows PCs every day at home despite the fact that they own smartphones. Why? Because it's a superior experience for those activities that are not specifically mobile-oriented. Now, I'm not going to make a broad statement about what people under 30 do or think, because I'm not interested in BS, but in facts. </p>
-
Stooks
<blockquote><a href="#281096"><em>In reply to F4IL:</em></a></blockquote><p>Nope, Nada, Zero. </p><p><br></p><p>Microsoft is going to soon be a cloud/subscription/enterprise only, focused company. </p><p><br></p><p>The question I really have at this point is when are they going to either shutdown or sell the Xbox? It sticks out, way out in their portfolio, as in does not fit in. Add to that it is dead last behind Sony, Nintendo and PC gaming.</p>
-
dontbe evil
<p><span style="color: rgb(55, 62, 68); background-color: transparent;">but but apps on pc sucks (windows)</span></p><p><span style="color: rgb(55, 62, 68); background-color: transparent;">wow apps on pc, apple is the best</span></p>
-
dontbe evil
<blockquote><a href="#281684"><em>In reply to roastedwookie:</em></a></blockquote><p><br></p><p>so how exactly are UWP apps that scale and adapt to different display size, resolution, input devices, with a really good IDE, SDK and shared code … compared to phone apps on pcs that doesn't scale, adapt, support touch screen, have a quite bad IDE, SDK and shared code?</p>
-
skane2600
<blockquote><a href="#281160"><em>In reply to nbplopes:</em></a></blockquote><p>I think both in the case of UWP and XCode as platforms, the "unification" argument is rather weak. If using the same tools to create applications on different systems is the only requirement for unification, than the C language with the C standard library is the king of unified platforms since that combination can run on more platforms than any other set of tools.</p>
-
skane2600
<blockquote><a href="#281292"><em>In reply to nbplopes:</em></a></blockquote><p>"They tried to provide an API/Framework aiming a cross device with 100% coverage over the entire computing framework"</p><p><br></p><p>Except that they didn't actually accomplish that. What they did instead was carve out a limited subset of all the functionality the different platforms could support. Then they made available device-specific APIs to fill in the gaps. They also made it possible to program a family of device-specific UIs imperatively or declaratively as a kind of modern version of #ifdef. </p><p><br></p><p>The truly useful feature would enable one to design a single UI on one device without regard to any of the others and have it run identically on all the supported systems without any device-specific tweaks. In the general case, this isn't possible.</p><p><br></p><p>I don't fault Microsoft for failing, just for pursing an unachievable goal.</p>
-
shameermulji
<blockquote><a href="#281195"><em>In reply to FalseAgent:</em></a></blockquote><p>Yes.</p><p><br></p><p>https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/06/04/apple-to-let-developers-port-ios-apps-to-mac-starts-with-own-apps-in-macos-mojave</p>
-
skane2600
<blockquote><a href="#281624"><em>In reply to curtisspendlove:</em></a></blockquote><p>The question is what percentage of iOS apps are non-mobile specific in their function, don't already have a web equivalent or don't have a more powerful alternative already available on MacOS? Only those apps that don't have those characteristics make sense to port to MacOS. It's fundamentally the same problem UWP has on Windows except that are lot more iOS apps.</p>
-
skane2600
<blockquote><a href="#281683"><em>In reply to roastedwookie:</em></a></blockquote><p>UWP failed because it was a fundamentally flawed idea, not because it was "junk". I have my doubts about developers porting iOS apps to MacOS but the difference is that iOS is a successful, already established platform and UWP was not. Given the significant bugs Apple has introduced in recent years, there's no particular reason to believe that Apple's implementation will be higher quality that its competitors.</p>