iPhone and iPad Apps Coming to Macs With Apple Silicon, Developers Can Manage Availability in App Store Connect

I don’t understand why some people are shooting down the ability to use iOS apps on Macs. It helps the entire ecosystem bring and keep mindshare and improves the application landscape. Think of how many developers there are that are cranking out great apps for iOS/iPadOS but have zero interest/time/knowledge to bring their app to Mac.

For example, I like using Apollo for accessing Reddit. The dev is a one-man shop and is passionate about his app— active in forums, twitter and so forth and constantly bringing improvements to it. His app is so good in fact, I have grown to abhor the traditional way of going through the web browser to get to Reddit and usually wind up reaching for my iPhone or iPad even while sitting at my Mac with a 26” screen in front of me. I would LOVE to see an Apollo for Mac but I know it won’t happen since the dev can’t find extra time to even knock out a Catalyst version right now.

The same with my favorite photo editing app (Affinity) and favorite lightweight video editing app (Lumafusion), all of which would be greatly appreciated and welcomed whenever they could run on my Mac.

One pressing question I've not seen answered is that for ARM Macs will the App Store be the only place to get software?

This is the question indeed. I would say no, and that ”sideloading” will always be a platform differentiator for MacOS along with it being able to run things in VMs and container. Otherwise you’ll have Macs become iPad Pro Ultra Extreme.

I’m still going to need command line apps like brew, ffmpeg, vim, ssh, tmux, python, and nodejs to work in my environment. But since they all work in current ARM systems like Raspberry Pi, then I would expect no worries on MacOS 11 on ARM. Mac devs use these tools too and they would need for them to work too.

Those icons in the dock are hideous. I don't think the icons should be unified between macOS and iOS, but if that must happen, use the icons from iOS, don't just take the Mac icon and throw a white rounded square behind it. That's just ugly.

Also... now that iOS apps are on macOS... what about the new iOS Widgets? Those seem kind of analogous to apps that live on the right side of the status bar...

This is a bad move. Let each platform be true to itself...

This really won't find much resonance. Apple themselves have rightfully stated again and again, that touch-based and pointer-based applications each need their own distinct UI.
Anything that tries to do both in one will inevitably suck. See Windows 8.

Not sure how much of a "mega" game changer this is. They have Android apps for Chromebook, and Android apps for Windows (BlueStacks), and apparently nobody realizes its a thing...

what does that have to do with macs?

Not sure how much of a "mega" game changer this is. They have Android apps for Chromebook, and Android apps for Windows (BlueStacks), and apparently nobody realizes its a thing...