Apple's platform unification push should center on making it easier for devs to share code between Mac and iOS apps, not on getting iOS apps to run on the Mac
@daringfireball, http://daringfireball.net/... Thanks: @cremnob
Context & Ripple Effects
A week after Bloomberg reported Apple plans to combine iPhone, iPad, and Mac apps, with developers able to expand iOS apps to Macs as early as late 2018, Daring Fireball pushes back on the mechanism: the goal should be easier code-sharing between platforms, not shipping iOS binaries onto the Mac. The distinction matters because it separates a developer-productivity play from an app-catalog transplant.
The debate didn't stay theoretical: by mid-2018 Apple had publicly confirmed a porting project slated for 2019 while denying a full OS merge, per its own clarification of the rumor, and Craig Federighi framed the effort around keeping hardware distinct. Three years later, Apple silicon Macs ran iOS apps natively through the Mac App Store — suggesting the shared-architecture path Gruber favored is where it landed.
First-order effects
- Developers building for both platforms immediately face a fork between porting existing iOS apps to the Mac versus refactoring around shared code, with Apple's tooling choices deciding which path gets the friction subsidy.
- If iOS apps land on the Mac wholesale, Mac users gain access to the iOS catalog but risk getting touch-first apps that ignore Mac conventions like windowing and menu bars.
Second-order effects
- Independent Mac developers whose products overlap with popular iOS apps would compete against ports subsidized by Apple's own frameworks, pressuring them to differentiate on Mac-native depth rather than feature parity.
- A code-sharing emphasis keeps Apple's developer tools — Swift, its UI frameworks — as the center of gravity, raising switching costs against cross-platform alternatives from Google and Microsoft already analyzed in earlier cross-platform comparisons.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points toward convergence at the architecture layer rather than the OS layer: one chip-and-framework stack under two distinct operating systems, which is effectively what the 2020 native-iOS-apps-on-Apple-silicon announcement delivered.
- If the framework-unification model holds, the Mac App Store and iOS App Store drift toward a single developer pipeline with platform-specific presentation, concentrating more of Apple's developer relationship in one set of APIs.
The trend: Apple is unifying its platforms through shared silicon and shared frameworks rather than merging macOS and iOS, letting iOS apps reach the Mac without collapsing the two operating systems into one.