Catalyst in Tahoe
I’m exploring macOS development, comparing Mac Catalyst apps vs native AppKit/SwiftUI apps.
- What are the main limitations of Catalyst today?
- In what scenarios is a native AppKit or SwiftUI app unavoidable?
Any insights are much appreciated — I’m trying to understand when Catalyst is sufficient and when going native is worth the extra effort.
Mac Catalyst seems dead to me. Five months since Tahoe’s official release and I still have crashes, ugly layouts and glitches that weren’t a problem pre-Liquid Glass.
I see no option other than build an entirely new SwiftUI-native Mac App.
[…]
I have a huge Foodnoms update that is almost ready, but I can’t ship it, because it would break syncing with the Mac app.
I could load up Sequoia and Xcode 16.4, but Apple is going to stop accepting binaries from 16.4 in April. And the UI compatibility plist option isn’t any better. It’s ugly AF.
Searching the forums, it seems like there a lot of new Catalyst bugs in Tahoe, but it does look like they are being fixed.
I shipped Liquid Glass in my Catalyst app and haven’t noticed any crashes or major issues. Most issues are SwiftUI regressions where I decided not to use UIKit 🥲
That pure SwiftUI on Mac idea scares me, too. So many weirdly different things. I think I’m sticking with sprinkling SwiftUI into AppKit where it’s useful to do so.
Previously:
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Every, EVERY Catalyst app I have, is garbage. Whether it's the technology, or the sort of people Catalyst tends to attract (iOS / Android developers looking to enter Mac development), or a combination of the two, Catalyst apps are universally janky.
Preference panels that just look like the iPad settings app, single-window-only apps with no concept that an app's windows might be distributed among multiple screens, no tear-off palettes, weird text sizings, missing items from contextual menus (Hey, Mona, put the Transformations entry into the contextual menu), window spawning that always happens dead centre of the main dispay, no matter how often you move newly spawned windows to other places, no Applescript support, no keyboard shortcuts.
MOST Catalyst apps are as bad as Mac apps, as Word 6 was, and if you're enough of a Mac greybeard, you know what a cutting insult that is. They look, feel, and operating like secondrate ports from another platform, and guess what, they largely are.
@Someone — Same here.
> Preference panels that just look like the iPad settings app, single-window-only apps with no concept that an app's windows might be distributed among multiple screens, no tear-off palettes, weird text sizings, missing items from contextual menus [...], window spawning that always happens dead centre of the main dispay, no matter how often you move newly spawned windows to other places, no Applescript support, no keyboard shortcuts.
I've also encountered apps that make their default app window's size impossible to resize. The pointer correctly changes shape when hovering around the window edges, but the drag-to-resize action is ignored. So you're either stuck with the default app window's size, or you put it in fullscreen. One such offender used to be the Prime Video app. It took Amazon a year to make the window freely resizable.
