Developers say Mac Catalyst is great for providing mouse and window support for iPad apps and porting simpler apps but struggles with complicated ones
Alex Blake / Digital Trends : Tweets: @stevesi and @matt_on_tech . Thanks: @smashdawg Tweets: Steven Sinofsky / @stevesi : Apple says Mac Catalyst is working. We asked developers to find out the truth // There's no scandal here, just reality of x-platform development even if platforms owned by the same. Experiences differ and that matters to being good apps on any platform. https://www.digitaltrends.com/ ... https://twitter.com/... Matthew S. Smith / @matt_on_tech : Apple made Mac Catalyst to help developers port from iOS to Mac. Is it working? Alex Blake asked multiple devs to find out. https://www.digitaltrends.com/ ... #catalyst #maccatalyst #mac #apple #iOS #iosdev Thanks: @smashdawg
Context & Ripple Effects
Apple pitched Project Catalyst in mid-2019 as the bridge that lets developers bring iPad apps to the Mac, with early adopters like Twitter, Gameloft, and TripIt sharing their experiences. Apple has since kept feeding the pipeline — shipping its own Catalyst-based Swift Playgrounds port in February 2020 as a proof point.
This developer survey cuts against the official narrative: Catalyst earns credit for the mechanical parts of porting (mouse and window support) but struggles once apps get complicated. The skepticism echoes the [[a:949066|argument that iOS and macOS are too fundamentally different for a cohesive cross-platform UX with minimal effort]], and it lands just months before Apple announced Apple-silicon Macs running iOS apps natively — an alternative answer to the same convergence question.
First-order effects
- Developers porting complex iPad apps to Mac face real rework beyond Catalyst's automatic mouse and window affordances, while simpler apps get a viable fast path to the Mac App Store.
- Apple's own Swift Playgrounds port now serves as the company's counterexample, but the survey gives developers outside Apple cover to be candid about Catalyst's limits.
Second-order effects
- Developers weighing a Mac port now have two competing Apple-endorsed routes — Catalyst conversion versus waiting for native iOS app support on Apple-silicon Macs — splitting effort and attention across the two.
- The friction pushes complex-app developers toward building native Mac versions instead, which raises the cost of Mac coverage for exactly the pro-grade software the platform's reputation depends on.
Third-order effects
- If Catalyst keeps working best for simple apps while Apple silicon handles iOS apps natively, Apple's convergence strategy may settle into a layered one: shared silicon and app availability at the bottom, with Catalyst relegated to the low-effort tier — a partial answer to the long-running critique that Apple under-serves compute- and memory-intensive Mac software.
The trend: Apple is converging iOS and the Mac through multiple overlapping mechanisms — Catalyst, shared silicon, native iOS app support — and developer experience, not the tooling, is deciding which layer each app lands in.