Apple's First Four iOS Apps For Mac Are Getting an Upgrade

Apple is counting on apps built for the iPad and the iPhone being converted to the Mac as a way to infuse new energy -- and a lot of new software -- into the granddaddy of its devices. From a report: The party started last year at WWDC 2018 when Apple announced a "sneak peek" at four of its own apps that it converted from iOS to MacOS. Those four were News, Voice Memos, Home and Stocks. But when the apps showed up in MacOS Mojave, they weren't greeted with much enthusiasm from Mac users because all four were rudimentary at best and didn't take advantage of the Mac's extra capabilities. Good news. Apple is fixing them. At WWDC 2019 earlier this month, Apple announced Project Catalyst, which streamlines the process for all software makers to bring their own iOS apps to Mac.

In an interview with CNET at WWDC, Apple software chief Craig Federighi confirmed that the four iOS apps for Mac released last year will get major updates based on the new technology in Project Catalyst. But he also revealed that the apps will get new designs to make them more Mac-like. "They're getting improvements," Federighi said. "The underlying technology has matured...Some of that is super low-level stuff. Some people have dissected those apps and realized that they were sort of two halves: an AppKit half and a UIKit half, literally running in different processes. That's all unified now. This has become much more of a native Mac framework...So automatically, the apps we built last year are upgraded."

Why not make A10 Macs?

[unixisc]

While that's fine for existing Mac users, why not make the Apple A10 the basis of future Macs, Airbooks and so on? That way, any app written for the iPad should automatically work for a Mac. Yeah, I get if one uses a keyboard w/ an iPad, it's almost the same thing, but in this case, a Mac can be made more powerful by tossing in more A10s, but at the same time, inherit the loads of apps that already happily run on iPads.

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[unixisc]

I actually meant the A series architecture: wasn't specifically singling out a particular generation. I was suggesting that Apple use their own in-house CPU for the Macs, rather than x86.

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[unixisc]

But the Mac is already a proprietary platform, and has been that since Steve Jobs aborted the PowerMac clones when he returned to Apple. The software people use on an x86 that you seem to be referring to are Windows software, since there is no reason software that's been developed specifically for OS-X can't be recompiled for the A-x (I actually meant A-X: A10 in my headline was just b'cos I assumed that that's the latest CPU from them out there). Apple already has total de-facto control: few who can live

That's not the reason....

[dgatwood]

But when the apps showed up in MacOS Mojave, they weren't greeted with much enthusiasm from Mac users because all four were rudimentary at best and didn't take advantage of the Mac's extra capabilities.

No, they weren't greeted with enthusiasm because their main benefit is specific to cell phones, and there's no real point in using them on the desktop.

• News — for people who need to be told what is news? AFAIK, the main reason for a news aggregation and personalization app is to get a better experience on a small screen, where you can't skim an entire page of headlines for the things that interest you. On a computer, you have enough screen real estate to make skimming news site trivial. So what's the benefit?
• Voice Memos — for people who carry around their laptop all the time? The whole point of voice memos is that it's a quick way to record notes while on the go. What use would that ever be on a laptop, realistically? And how could it ever be more useful than just whipping out your cell phone and doing it there?
• Home — for people who can't be bothered to get up from their desk to turn on the lights? This feels like the sort of app that you'd use almost exclusively on a tablet mounted to your wall or a tabletop in a given room, not on a laptop in front of you. Computers just aren't portable enough for this to make sense.
• Stocks — for people who forgot their E*Trade password? This app isn't super-useful, even on iOS. Once in a blue moon, I glance at a couple of my larger holdings just out of idle curiosity, but if I'm using my laptop, it's faster to type AAPL in Safari's search bar than it would be to launch a separate app, and realistically, that will always give you far more info with far more ability to dig in if you want to do so (including reading related news stories, etc., which would kick you back to a browser again). But for the most part, if you care about stocks, unless you're a stockbroker, you probably care about it more in the context of your portfolio gains and losses. And if you're a stockbroker, you want real-time data, not delayed data. So who a desktop Stocks app intended to benefit? I just don't get it.

It isn't that the desktop apps don't have features, but rather that the only reason you'd want that sort of app at all is because it doesn't have too many features, and you just want to do something trivially on a phone. In every other situation, a web browser does a better job.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Home — for people who can't be bothered to get up from their desk to turn on the lights?

ROTFL. Who do you think buys all those Amazon Echo, Google Home, and other bugging devices? People who won't get up to order toilet paper. Don't believe for a second the market for this is not huge.

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[dgatwood]

ROTFL. Who do you think buys all those Amazon Echo, Google Home, and other bugging devices? People who won't get up to order toilet paper. Don't believe for a second the market for this is not huge.

Yeah, but what about the market for people who want to control various devices in their home, don't have any voice-based hardware to control those devices, and would rather use a laptop to control those devices so than a tablet or phone? That sounds like it would be about three people.

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[dgatwood]

And just to be clear, I'm not saying there aren't reasons for incidental use of these apps on desktop, assuming they're closely synced with the cell phone app. For example, if your cell phone dies and you want to adjust the thermostat, having a laptop as a backup would be a good idea. Or if you're already using your laptop and you want to quickly look something up in a voice memo that you recorded on your phone the day before, it could be handy. But I would expect 99% of people's use to happen on a phon

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[hawk]

You're understating the case.

These aren't useful on a phone either, at least for someone with regular access to a computer . . .

hawk

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[dgatwood]

Some of them are. A voice recorder app is quite useful for quickly recording voice memos while on the go. You're not going to want to drag out your laptop just to make notes to yourself. And an app for controlling things like lights and thermostats is useful in some situations, though I'll grant you that a tablet is likely to give a better experience than a phone unless you're using Siri to control things by voice.

The utility of a news app and a stocks app is much smaller, but there's nothing wrong with

Okay?

[Brostenen]

Releases app version of programs, realises that people don't want it. Then upgrading the app's to be more non-app like. Does not compute. What was the idea behind app's anyway?

Crappy mobile UX/UI

[Malc]

It's bad enough that so many websites and the frameworks that build them are optimised got mobile now. Now they want to bring this experience to local apps?

I don't want oversized buttons and wasted space, and easily overlooked stuff hidden off the bottom of the page that requires unnecessary scrolling. For example, the last time I searched for flights on BA's website, it showed just 2.5 of them from a long list, whilst 2/3 of the visible page was dedicated to useless crap. In the past there would have be

Your computer, their CoC

[AHuxley]

Now has a smartphone CoC on its software.
When software is found too sinful will it be approved for use on a computer?

But...why??

[Dustie]

Does anyone want this? I have yet to meet anyone that does. Apple is going down the drain.

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[unixisc]

I don't know about the above items specifically, but one of the legacy complaints about Mac OS had been that it has too small an application base, when compared to Windows. However, on mobile platforms, iOS has excellent acceptance and adaptation. As it is, Apple has been gaining due to the devolution of Windows: if they can get iOS apps to somehow port to or run on Mac OS, they can close the Windows argument that the latter has more apps

I for one hardly use my Windows laptop anymore: I use a FreeBSD on