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Comment by eugeniub | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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