Apple revealed its plan to merge iOS, iPad and Mac apps at WWDC last year and is working for quite some time on it under the “Marzipan” project. Now, a Bloomberg report says that Apple has set 2021 as the year by when it will combine all the apps.
Apple has already rolled out iOS versions of default apps like News, Voice Memo, Stocks, and Home in macOS Mojave 10.14.
Bloomberg’s report says that Apple will unveil a new SDK at this year’s WWDC event that will allow developers to bring iPad apps to Mac by this year and the iPhone apps will be ported to Mac by 2020. This will reduce developers’ efforts, and they will not be required to write the code twice or thrice for the same app to work on different devices.
For a starter, the developers will still have to submit separate apps for iPad and macOS on their respective Stores, but their work will be reduced. By 2021, the company aims to create a single binary that will work across devices like iPhone, iPad, and Mac. It will be one of the biggest changes that Apple will introduce.
These plans almost sound similar to Microsoft’s efforts to push Windows to different devices which ultimately halted as Windows phones failed to compete with Android and iOS smartphones. Still, its Universal Windows Platform is running smoothly for the rest of Windows 10-powered devices. And also Google has made Android compatible with its Chrome OS.
However, unlike Microsoft, Apple does not wish to unite operating systems and iOS, and macOS would be individual operating systems. Also, the project invited possibilities of extra revenue to the developers and also it could be possible that the apps that have abandoned the Mac App Store may return, like, Twitter.
We’re expecting Apple to spill more beans about its ‘Marzipan’ project at this year’s WWDC which is could happen between June 3rd and June 7th.
