Apple's Cross-Platform iOS, macOS Apps Feature Won't Arrive Until 2019

Apple is believed to be planning to bring iOS apps to macOS later this year, but it looks like the company's plans have changed. A new report claims that the new cross-platform feature for iOS and macOS apps won’t be happening until 2019.

This piece of news comes from John Gruber at Daring Fireball, who claims to have acquired the information from “mostly second-hand sources.” Gruber says that Apple’s project “sounds like a declarative control API,” which would allow developers to not write classical procedural code, but declare a feature and its attributes using another form.

“There’s nothing inherently cross-platform about a declarative control API,” Gruber explained. “But it makes sense that if Apple believes that (a) iOS and MacOS should have declarative control APIs, and (b) they should address the problem of abstracting the API differences between UIKit (iOS) and AppKit (MacOS), they would tackle them at the same time. Or perhaps the logic is simply that if they’re going to create a cross-platform UI framework, the basis for that framework should be a declarative user interface.”

In simpler terms, a declarative control API doesn’t necessarily mean cross-platform development, but it could provide developers with a way to build apps that can run on different types of user interfaces at once. The Verge pointed out that this won’t allow developers to port existing iPad apps to Mac computers since those apps would still need to be coded for each platform.

Back in December, Bloomberg reported that Apple’s upcoming project was called internally as “Marzipan.” However, Gruber claims that it’s now being called a different name and that Marzipan may have simply been the codename given to the project in its earlier stages. Gruber also says that he’s “nearly certain” that this feature won’t be shown off during Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) next month. He believes that it might arrive in 2019, possibly for macOS 10.15 and iOS 13.

Having apps run on both iOS and macOS is something that users may want, but Apple CEO Tim Cook believes otherwise. In an interview with The Sydney Morning Herald, Cook said that “I don’t think that’s what users want.”

“We don't believe in sort of watering down one for the other. Both [The Mac and iPad] are incredible. One of the reasons that both of them are incredible is because we pushed them to do what they do well. And if you begin to merge the two ... you begin to make trade offs and compromises," Cook said.