Apple is planning to unify iOS and Mac apps

A new report by Mark Gurman at Bloomberg is out this morning in which he says that Apple is planning to let developers build a single app that can run on both iOS and macOS.

Starting as early as next year, software developers will be able to design a single application that works with a touchscreen or mouse and trackpad depending on whether it’s running on the iPhone and iPad operating system or on Mac hardware.

According to Gurman’s sources, we can expect to see this type of unified app experience in late 2018 with the release of iOS 12 and macOS 10.14.

This is big news for a couple of reasons, the first is because while the iOS App Store has flourished the same cannot be said about the Mac App Store which isn’t as popular with developers. By allowing developers to build unified apps, it expands the marketplace which is good for developers, consumers, and Apple. It also means that all of your favorite iOS apps will make their way to the Mac assuming developers update them to the unified codebase (which I’m guessing most likely will).

Overall, I think this is a smart move by Apple and is one that has probably been a very long time in the making. That being said, I really hope it works out well and that unified apps work just as well on macOS as they do on iOS. Let’s not forget that Microsoft tried to do the whole unified apps and operating system thing with Windows and they failed. Although, they [Microsoft] didn’t have even an inkling of the developer support that’s behind iOS for Windows Phone. Nonetheless, if this report is true, I’m optimistic it’ll work out very nicely for everyone.