From people with experience in both, UIKit is better designed than AppKit. Apple sees this and I think it's pretty clear their intent is for UIKit to supersede AppKit on macOS. One day.
Apple unfortunately shipped what is effectively the alpha version to the public.
They're built to serve different audiences, just like iOS and macOS they support. macOS and AppKit are designed around multiple windows, side-by-side, with very specific mouse and keyboard navigation conventions. iOS and UIKit are designed around single windows with nested navigation stacks, view controllers and gesture-based navigation. One tool for each job. It's not about replacement.
As always, you can use any API to implement any piece of software. It behooves you to focus on your user and pick the one that lets you provide the best experience. They're the same programming languages and just different accents on the framework. You'll figure it out if you care.
NSColor/UIColor are different, and it's not like one color class is better for windowed versus non-windowed colors. NSBezierPath/UIBezierPath perform the same task yet often the same methods have different names.
I've wasted a bunch of time making extensions so that one OS's classes would look like the other (annoying but not difficult). The fact that every developer has to do this is just silly. Apple's own WWDC video on iWork essentially says "Because we wanted it to be cross-platform, we avoided drawing the standard way, and draw all content using CALayers instead".
If Apple did nothing else but make the parts that work identically be named identically, that would be Marzipan enough for me.
Debatable. AppKit might have a bunch of legacy cruft, but it also has some truly beautiful things like bindings, or how certain interface controls work. It's a much more mature framework.
Apple hasn't shipped any library to the public.
There are 4 apps available for macOS that are entirely written with UIKit, with the exception of the bridge required to interact with macOS. They shipped those apps to the public, and they feel like incomplete apps.
Can you expand on this? I haven't done iOS development, so I'd be interested in what ways people consider UIKit superior. Although it wouldn't surprise me, since it came much later than AppKit and they had hindsight when designing it.
People seem to go back and forth on it, as in this post from a couple of years ago.
>The thing is, UIKit "just works" (most of the time at least). AppKit has so much historical garbage that it's become a pain to work with for modern macOS apps. It's still really hard to make simple things like customizing system controls and Core Animation doesn't work as well on it as it does on UIKit.
https://medium.com/@guilhermerambo/why-uikit-for-macos-is-im...