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Comment by drawfloat | Hacker News Reader

I still raise an eyebrow whenever Apple pushes running iOS apps on Mac as a big plank of its desktop strategy. SwiftUI is still incomplete, badly documented, and a bit of an arse to work with. A shame, because it has the potential to be really enjoyable to work with. But until they sort that out, this whole strategy of theirs seems half baked.

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Not sure if you're seeing the bigger picture here. SwiftUI is not necessary. You can build an iOS app entirely in UIKit and target the Mac via Catalyst. In addition to that, any iOS apps that don't target Catalyst will be runnable on an ARM Mac, unless the developer opts out.

I thought Catalyst was a shorter term solution for existing apps, but greenfield apps are being pushed to SwiftUI? I admit I find the overlap between the two to still be confusing.

It is confusing until you use any Catalyst app.

They are utter garbage; there isn't a single good Catalyst app, they're all putrefactive shit on the Mac. The JIRA app — which Apple demo'd on stage when they unveiled Catalyst — is hands-down the worst app I have ever used on the Mac, and I've been using the Mac since I was like 13 and my mom had an SE30, and I also spent 2000-2008 as a developer of Mac apps (iGet, iGet Mobile, and worked on some others).

SwiftUI is still kind of painful, but way less painful then it was at launch. SwiftUI is an interesting new paradigm, and it really does seem that it will be good someday, and even possibly soon. It's already awesome if you happen to not hit the (many) areas where it is still lacking.

Catalyst will never be good, and Apple will kill it as soon as they possibly can.

Hear hear! Even Apple's own Catalyst apps are no good. They're turning the Mac into an iPad Plus :(

Yes, but it's pretty clearly transitional tech. Apple knows that it's shit. It's a stopgap until SwiftUI matures — and you can tell because SwiftUI is maturing fast.

Macs running Apple Silicon can run iOS apps unchanged.

It's the legacy Intel Macs that need Catalyst.

The strategy is not had-baked, it’s just half-implemented (i.e. they aren’t finished yet).

This is just like the Carbon/Cocoa issue back in the original OS X.

5 years from now it will be obvious to everyone that SwiftUI has been a huge leap, but with some normal transitional bumps along the way.

The guys on the ATP podcast talked about this a couple weeks ago (last week maybe?) and it’s a great conversation - I highly recommend it.

While many of these are still half baked technologies, they are still better than wrapping up an electron app and calling it a day.

They will run unmodified on Apple Silicon.

>I still raise an eyebrow whenever Apple pushes running iOS apps on Mac

Microsoft certainly attempted to create an Android subsystem for Windows, it just didn't work.

This is the only part of their strategy to me that I don't understand. Running unmodified iOS apps on a Mac is going to be such a terrible experience and there's no way around it. Why? Just because they can?

Shipping an unmodified iOS apps for Mac is a really easy way for developers to validate market demand. If there's enough demand, they can invest in Mac-specific improvements and hopefully grow their market share. If not, at least the cost of discovery was low.

Ipad apps on a mac laptop with touchscreen would be great. And some of the design changes in MacOS 11 look like they are making mac UI elements touch accessible.

also a transformer to macbook way thinkpad had their models with keyboard folding to the back also would be nice.

I’m guessing mostly for the sake of absorbing the iOS games ecosystem. Especially the ones that already have game pad support.

There's a lot of great tooling for making iOS apps without using Swift or Swift UI (Flutter, ReactNative, etc). I'm a JavaScript developer, and I hate Electron apps as much as anybody. The ability to use ReactNative to compile to an iOS app that runs on the desktop opens up a LOT of possibilities for me.

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