Tuesday, June 5, 2018

Apple Announces Marzipan for 2019

During its annual developer conference, the Cupertino, California-based company said the two app platforms will merge next year, allowing apps built for its iOS mobile operating system to also run on Mac computers. Bloomberg reported the planned change in December, but Apple hasn’t talked about it publicly until Monday, when it gave a preview.

Lauren Goode (tweet):

The point of this is not to create a single unified OS, Federighi said. But the fact that Apple spoke openly about an initiative that could arrive as late as a year from now is a clear nod to how the tech giant perceives the future of apps.

At WWDC on Monday, Apple said some of its homegrown iOS apps, including Home, Stocks, News, and Voice Memos, would be available later this year on macOS Mojave, the next version of macOS. On the surface, it seems obvious that Apple might make some of its own apps available across different platforms. But behind the scenes, Apple has been building tools third-party developers can eventually use to port their own apps from iOS to MacOS with what Federighi insists will be minimal effort. Apple began this initiative around two years ago, and its own internal software engineers have been beta testing the tools. These four iOS apps for Mac are the products of that testing.

John Gruber:

Still very light on technical details. I get why they announced this a year early — because they wanted to start shipping their own apps built on this — but it’s so unusual for Apple.

Bob Burrough:

Craig says the goal is not to merge iOS and macOS, but that is inevitably where this will end up.

Steve Troughton-Smith:

“We’re not merging macOS and iOS!” …but btw almost all the new Mac apps we showed today came from iOS and use UIKit

Steve Troughton-Smith:

The ARM transition seems so obvious at this point, it’s not even news. But UIKit on macOS was definitely not how I expected them to do it

Steve Troughton-Smith:

Marzipan is wild. It’s running the UIKit apps with XPC & remote rendering. Not quite Mac OS Classic.app, but it totally feels like an alien OS hiding in the background

Steve Troughton-Smith:

Oh man

Steve Troughton-Smith:

So, Mac developers, how are you feeling about UIKit on macOS now you’ve had time to digest the news?

Steve Troughton-Smith:

Right now, it seems all-or-nothing; I would have expected apps with both AppKit & UIKit code, interleaved views, etc — but no way if they have separate window servers like now. That may change over timeSteve Troughton-Smith added,

Steve Troughton-Smith:

This is a fun UI on macOS

Colin Cornaby:

The current approach isn’t really evolvable into hybrid AppKit/UIKit apps at all so I’m not sure where this goes. The way the stack is oriented it’s not even remotely positioned to replace AppKit in the stack. Good for us AppKit lovers I suppose but generally confusing.

Colin Cornaby:

Ok one more Marzipan hot take.

It bothers me that if Marzipan is the “so you can’t afford to make a real Mac app” stopgap that Apple would ship key built in apps with it.

I know it’s dogfooding but it’s also Apple putting out second class Mac apps by their own definition.

Uli Kusterer:

From how I interpreted @stroughtonsmith’s spelunking so far, it is somewhere between a VM and NSOpenPanel. Out-of-process but transparent to the client app.

I think they’re taking the opportunity to move more of their code into a micro-kernel-like silo.

Colin Cornaby:

UIKit is not young. It’s about as old as Toolbox was when discussions started about it’s future, and it also is on a platform that’s outgrowing it.

Sticking it in a virtual environment is the perfect way to not commit to it while deciding your next move.

Previously:

Update (2018-06-06): Jason Snell:

It feels like Federighi’s cutting it awfully close on the “unique ergonomics” front, though. Apple itself sells a keyboard for the iPad Pro, and even allows users to move their fingers like they’re using a trackpad when editing text. The iPhone and iMac Pro are about as far as two devices can get from one another, but the MacBook and the iPad Pro are not.

In his interview with Wired, Federighi also pooh-poohed the idea that Apple might make a MacBook with a touchscreen. And yet one of Apple’s greatest arguments against touch on macOS—that Mac software was designed with keyboard and pointing device in mind—is going to very rapidly become obsolete as iOS-sourced apps appear on the Mac in 2019 and 2020.

Rob Griffiths:

I think it’s time for a new word…

Marzipandemic: The spread of single-window odd-UI originally-on-iOS apps to the Mac.

Update (2018-06-07): Colin Cornaby:

I still really wish they’d actually made a UIFoundation that was shared between Mac and iOS and had common elements. It would solve all this...

But Apple, even publicly, is pitching this as a repackaging process of existing iOS apps, not developing Mac first apps with UIKit.

Adam Swinden:

Although I want to believe Marzipan will kill Electron, I doubt it will. Electron isn’t used by iOS developers who don’t know how to make a Mac app. It’s used by web developers who don’t know how to make a Mac app.

Update (2018-06-08): Steve Troughton-Smith:

Developer/user question: what features or UI elements does a Mac app need to have to be considered a good platform citizen? i.e. in your opinion what specific things does UIKit/Marzipan need to grow to actually be viable for Mac apps?

Update (2018-06-11): Jean-Louis Gassée:

In the end, Apple’s UIKit port to macOS raises questions we can’t answer. iOS apps such as News, Stocks, and Home ported to macOS are nice, but, again, I don’t see a stampede of iOS apps crossing the bridge to macOS, not enough to move the Mac volume needle. This leaves us with two possibilities. Either the UIKit move is a titillating but unimportant sideshow, or it’s part of a larger hardware plan for the Mac.