Apple Plans Combined iPhone, iPad and Mac Apps To Create One User Experience (bloomberg.com)

An anonymous reader shares a Bloomberg report: Apple's iPhone and iPad introduced a novel way of interacting with computers: via easy-to-use applications, accessible in the highly curated App Store. The same approach hasn't worked nearly as well on Apple's desktops and laptops. The Mac App Store is a ghost town of limited selection and rarely updated programs. Now Apple plans to change that by giving people a way to use a single set of apps that work equally well across its family of devices: iPhones, iPads and Macs. 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 people familiar with the matter. Developers currently must design two different apps -- one for iOS, the operating system of Apple's mobile devices, and one for macOS, the system that runs Macs. With a single app for all machines, Mac, iPad and iPhone users will get new features and updates at the same time.

Comments

MicroAppleSoft

[Zorro]

So how has this worked out for Windows so far?

Re:MicroAppleSoft

[JohnFen]

I wonder why they're not encouraging that?

Probably because there's not a lot of saving in development costs that way. For most applications, it's the UI work that takes up the bulk of development time, not the business logic. If you still have to have a different UI for each platform, you aren't really saving much in terms of development costs.

The problem is that a "one UI for everything" approach appears to be inherently flawed. Different platforms have different strengths and weaknesses, and if you just address the least common denominator of them all, you end up with something pretty crappy.

Re:We all knew this was coming

[omnichad]

And Launchpad that came long before - looks just like the iOS home screen. The move to the same filesystem as iOS (APFS). The addition of a secure enclave chip to the iMac Pro. Internet recovery. All points to an eventual merged platform.

Amphi-car?

[DigitalSorceress]

Remember the failure of the Amphi-car? it was neither a very good boat nor a very good car...

This is how I see apps that are trying to be all things .. phones / tablets / desktops have very different UIs ..and for good reason.

Play to each platforms strengths.. Microsoft tried to do this with its windows store Universal Plaform stuff and well, I can't speak for anyone else, but even on my Surface pro, I never run those "apps" .. I use it like a PC.. keyboard and touchpad/mouse

Done correctly it would work.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Snark and odious comparisons with Microsoft's foray into shoehorning desktop into phone UI aside, done correctly it would work.

Separating content from presentation, graceful degradation, etc have very strong unix roots. It was in the context of character terminals interacting with graphical displays, but still, nroff, troff, LaTeX, TeX, original HTML are all really markup languages interpreting data appropriately for the devices that consume them.

So done correctly, it could work

Apple has a track record of doing it right. So it could work for Apple, though a similar attempt by Microsoft was pathetic.