In his last Monday Note, iOS – macOS: What No Actually Means, Jean-Louis Gassée proposes his perspective on Marzipan:
Having closed one door [“And the fact that the Mac and iOS share so much technology has led people almost every year to keep asking us the question: are you merging iOS and Mac OS? So I’d like to take a moment to briefly address this question. No. Of course not.”], Federighi hastened to open a new one. Instead of an OS chimera, Apple’s software chief announced a bridge between the two related but incompatible software worlds. As it turns out, last year’s Marzipan project rumors, which predicated exactly this state of affairs, were accurate.
In simplified but relevant terms, a foundation of iOS apps, called UIKit, will also appear on macOS.
As a result, in 2019, iOS apps will also run on our Macs. By some measure, there are approximately 2.1M iOS apps in Apple’s App Store. By contrast, macOS apps number in the low thousands — a slightly misleading measure since some Mac apps are available independent of the regulated App Store. But with that caveat, iOS apps certainly outnumber macOS apps by at least an order of magnitude — a ratio that parallels the macOS vs iOS revenue and unit numbers.
I have much respect for Mr Gassée, and I always read his observations with great interest, but there are a couple of things about this quoted passage above that do not convince me.
Firstly, yes, numbers are misleading, but not in the way Gassée notes. Those 2.1 million iOS apps really sound like a huge number compared to what’s available for the Mac, but please, let’s avoid using gross numbers as a measure for a platform’s ‘quality of life’. Sure, iOS attracts a lot of developers, and it’s certainly a lively, healthy platform, but:
- If we isolate the truly useful, well-designed, competently-written iOS apps, I dare argue that of those initial 2.1 million, we end up with a number which realistically is more in the thousands. Maybe even in the low thousands if we restrict the sample to western markets. Of course, we could apply the same logic to Mac apps. There are terrible ones in the Mac App Store. But from what I observed in all these years in the two different App stores, there are many more terrible iOS apps than Mac apps. So let’s say that the truly useful, well-designed, competently-written Mac apps are in the hundreds. This nevertheless significantly reduces the gap between the two platforms, in my opinion.
If you think I’m off the mark, carry out a simple experiment. If you both use Mac OS and iOS, think about how many apps you really use on a regular basis on your devices. No, not how many you have installed and/or tried out. How many you use regularly. How many you depend on. I have seen a lot of homescreens these past months. Assuming that people keep the most frequently used apps outside folders (they can be reached more quickly this way), then I’d say that on average the most used iOS apps amount to little more than one springboard screen, maybe one and a half. That’s about 35 apps. Which is more or less the amount of apps you’d use on a Mac on a regular basis (again, I’m assuming a prosumer user here). On this vintage PowerBook G4 I’m writing on, I have 29 apps in the Dock, and if they’re there, it means that they’re frequently used. There are at least 10–12 more I resort to occasionally.
- Another thing to take into account is the different nature of iOS devices (especially iPhones), and Mac OS computers. This contributes to the difference in number of available apps. There are a lot of single-purpose apps made for iOS, because the kind of simplicity of iOS, and the way we use our iPhones, call for this kind of apps. While on a Mac I may access a website and its services via a browser, on iOS you often have separate apps for that (iMDB, Yelp, eBay, The Guardian, The New York Times, Flickr… you get the idea). Then, on iOS we have entire categories of apps — like photo-taking apps and weather apps — whose sheer variety makes less sense on a Mac; or no sense at all, since you really don’t use a Mac to take photos. The same can be said for all those apps which, on iOS, take advantage of touch as its core input method: apps for drawing, painting, taking handwritten notes. On the Mac, it’s easier to find feature-rich image editors whose overall functionality encompasses many different iOS apps.
I think you’re getting my point by now: we can’t simply say that the Mac app world is “relatively anemic” just because there are fewer apps available, when a lot of iOS apps exist simply because they make sense on iOS in a way they wouldn’t on a Mac. Talking about strength in numbers, here, is slightly misleading.
And this brings me to another point. Gassée writes:
The iOS-macOS UIKit bridge will pump new blood into the (relatively) anemic Mac app world. The arrangement will benefit everyone: iOS developers will find new customers on the Mac, customers who pay multiples of $10 vs single digits for iOS apps; Mac users will be given a wider choice of apps; and Apple gets a livelier macOS store.
Bear in mind that Mac customers tend to pay “multiples of $10” when they get an app that’s worth that price in features, usefulness, dependability, design. If you’ve been developing exclusively for iOS, don’t think you can just port to the Mac your cool little single-purpose iOS app and expect to charge $15 for it versus the $2.99 of its iOS counterpart. Mac apps tend to favour a rich set of features and a different level of complexity compared with iOS apps. This doesn’t mean that there’s no space for single-purpose apps on the Mac. This means that Macs have a user interface that’s been historically unafraid of complexity and layers of functionality and interaction, and in this perspective single-purpose apps are considered accessories, ancillary apps. Often they take the form of unobtrusive utilities that live in the menubar, as opposed to full-featured apps taking up most of the interface, and with their icon in the Dock. In short, Mac users (especially non-casual Mac users) have a different set of expectations.
As for the “wider choice of apps”, while it certainly isn’t a bad thing, I wholeheartedly hope that this new bridge between iOS and Mac OS won’t bring a deluge of apps that are low-quality, poorly executed, and designed with the wrong platform in mind. I hope the Mac App Store won’t inherit all the bad practices we’ve seen happen in the iOS App Store: the nasty predominance of the freemium model, silly games that nickel-and-dime users through In-App purchases, and the terrible, unsustainable race to the bottom when it comes to app prices. I’d rather have a “relatively anemic” app store — but with quality apps in the $25–50 range — than a “livelier” one but with the added crap we’ve seen on iOS so far.
Apple could have rekindled the interest in Mac app development in so many ways, instead they chose this path — using iOS as bait, shortcut, and model — which feels the least Mac-like to me, if you know what I mean. And they led by example: I’m not referring to the News, Stocks, Home, and Voice Memos apps showcased at the WWDC. I’m talking about what they did three years ago: taking away two good Mac apps, iPhoto and Aperture, to serve that wishy-washy hybrid that is Photos.