“Michael Tsai - Blog - The Case Against Marzipan”
Discussion. I don’t know yet what I think about iOS apps coming to macOS
Jack Baty I feel like they'll be similar to Electron apps: They won't be good Mac citizens but we wouldn't have them at all otherwise.
Thomas Juntunen The comment about Apple needing some kind of response to Electron seems on the money. I still prefer native apps though.
@tmj It seems possible, though, that Marzipan apps will crowd native apps out even further and feel just about as native on macOS as Electron.
Thomas Juntunen Which would be a shame, but would that be better or worse than no answer to Electron? At least one can hope Apple improves things in future iterations.
Smokey Ardisson @tmj Reading that comment, for the very first time the existance of Marzipan made some sense to me. I don’t like it any better, but at least it sort-of makes sense.
@tmj Bringing over iOS apps to macOS hastens the demise of native apps as writing one app for both iOS and macOS will be much more compelling for Swift/Objective-C devs than just making a macOS app.
OTOH, if they wanted to react to Electron in a way that improved macOS as a desktop OS, they could have adopted a two-pronged strategy:
- Build a Electron-a-like for macOS out of WebKit and node that performs better, has improved accessibility, uses the built-in WebView, and has more hooks for native macOS behaviour.
- Improve Electron to have better accessibility and more native features.
Bringing iOS apps to macOS is only the right response to Electron if your primary focus is iOS and macOS is only a secondary concern.
(IMHO, and all that.)
Thomas Juntunen If one can assume all (many? most?) devs want to have their apps on both Mac OS and iOS then I think you make a lot of sense. And while I can think of genres that’s true for (games, text editing), I don’t think it’s true across the board. That said, I like the sound of number one. I hope someone at Apple is thinking along those lines.
@tmj They do tend to think pretty far ahead. For all their faults, Apple definitely isn't reactionary and tend to think things through properly. The only question, really, is whether their priorities are still lining up with that of pro Mac users.