Apple's first iOS apps on Mac, via its universal framework Marzipan, are sluggish, have UI quirks, non-standard behaviors, should not be preinstalled on Mojave
I don't like marzipan. And I don't like Marzipan. — I haven't been running Mojave on my machine in the beta period. Tweets: @jerkob , @fakebaldur , @zeveisenberg , and @stroughtonsmith Tweets: Jacob Terry / @jerkob : Good commentary and details here on the first iOS apps on Mac. I have been a little surprised myself at how buggy they are, and in ways that feel like won't be easily fixed. Marzipan http://benjaminmayo.co.uk/... Baldur Bjarnason / @fakebaldur : “I don't like marzipan. And I don't like Marzipan.” My worry is that this is the inevitable future of Mac software: that not only will most third party apps be light iOS ports but that Apple will slowly shift their built-in apps to be the same. http://benjaminmayo.co.uk/... Zev Eisenberg / @zeveisenberg : Great overview of some UI issues in the new Marzipan apps in Mojave. It's a good reminder of why Apple hesitated to make touch Macs: the UI paradigms are just too different. http://benjaminmayo.co.uk/... Steve Troughton-Smith / @stroughtonsmith : Everybody's looking at Marzipan and going ‘wow, these apps will never fit in on macOS’ and I'm here going ‘wow, this is what Mac apps are going to all be like in a few years...’ http://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Marzipan was pitched as the bridge that would let developers bring iOS apps to the Mac without rewriting them, and its first fruits ship bundled with Mojave itself. The verdict from early testers is blunt: the ported apps are sluggish, carry UI quirks, and behave in non-standard ways — problems Jacob Terry and others flag as structural rather than easily patched, and Baldur Bjarnason worries this port-first model is where Mac software is headed.
Two years later, Apple removed the technical half of the objection by announcing that Macs running its own chips can run iOS apps natively, making the shared architecture a hardware fact rather than a translation layer. This review of Marzipan's first output is the baseline against which that later promise gets judged.
First-order effects
- Users who buy a new Mac get four iOS-derived apps preinstalled in a state reviewers describe as half-baked, putting Apple's own software quality on display at the OS level.
- Developers watching the launch see a cautionary signal: adopting Marzipan now means shipping Mac apps with non-standard behavior until Apple fixes the framework.
Second-order effects
- Third-party Mac developers hold off on porting, leaving the App Store's Mac catalog thin and pressuring Apple to mature the toolchain before the ecosystem commits.
- The criticism pushes Apple toward a deeper fix than UI polish — converging the platforms at the silicon level, which is exactly the route the Apple-silicon announcement later took.
Third-order effects
- If Bjarnason's worry holds, the long-run structure of Mac software shifts toward iOS-derived apps as the default, with native Mac development becoming the niche — a trajectory iPadOS reinforced when it added Stage Manager and desktop-class multitasking, blurring the line from the other direction.
The trend: Apple's iOS-Mac convergence is proceeding through successive layers — framework, then silicon, then shared interaction models — with each rough first step treated as scaffolding rather than a dead end.