Apple’s Mac Catalyst is meant to provide a simple way for iOS developers to bring their apps to the Mac. The early efforts didn’t inspire a lot of confidence, but now that the project has been underway for almost nine months, Digital Trends takes stock of the state of Mac Catalyst.
Is Apple’s vision for the future of the Mac working for developers?
Alex Blake for Digital Trends:
Perjan Duro is the founder of financial app MoneyCoach, and he’s one of the first developers we spoke to about Catalyst. He said that converting his team’s apps from iPad to Mac was “one of the highlights of the summer” … He told us he thought the technology was “very promising,” although whether or not a developer should use it depends on the “use case of the app and the technologies that it uses. 80% of the time, it gets the job done.”
Atlassian is a software company based out of Sydney, Australia, and known for the issue-tracking application Jira. I spoke to Simon Stiefel, a senior engineer for the company, who was quite positive about how Catalyst helped Atlassian kick off its Mac development… Kriss Smolka, founder of HabitMinder creator Funn Media, was also excited to get started. He dove right in with Mac Catalyst at WWDC 2019, saying it took him and his team under three days to port HabitMinder to the Mac.
MacDailyNews Take: Catalyst is a building block, along with SwiftUI, of course, that builds a foundation for Macs powered by Apple-designed ARM-based chips. Any work required by Catalyst fro developers will be well worth their time when the next big Mac transition begins.
I think ya got a typo in your headline there MDN…Is …is
As a developer who has tried and failed to convert some iOS apps to the Mac, I can tell you that this feature still needs a lot of work, especially in Xcode. Granted, it wont convert everything to make it work on the Mac, but you’d think the feature would be more ready for prime time than its current state.