What the Mac needs now is courage

This year at its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), Apple is widely expected to expand the program for bringing iPad apps to the Mac, a “multiyear” project it kicked off last year. The project is codenamed “Marzipan,” and this year, we’ll see exactly how it’ll work for developers. It’s expected to be much more ambitious than what we’ve seen before, and we may discover that these apps, built with iOS’s UIKit framework instead of the traditional MacOS AppKit framework, can be much more elegant and Mac-like than they are right now.

That’s because they can’t get much worse.

The current state of Marzipan apps has caused no small amount of consternation among many in the Mac community. It doesn’t take much to see why: just open up the Home app, Stocks, Voice Memos, or Apple News app in macOS Mojave, and you’ll see that these apps are un-Mac-like in ways almost too numerous to count. There’s no support for multiple windows, weird resizing bugs, thin keyboard shortcut support, and a look and feel that clearly is designed for touch instead of a mouse.

In our Mojave review, Jake Kastrenakes called them “half-baked.” John Gruber has described them as “terrible,” “totally shitty,” and “dreadfully bad.” In a post detailing many of the reasons why these apps stink, Benjamin Mayo writes, “These are mediocre, bordering on bad, experiences.”

The apps are not good. I think Apple should make more of them.

In fact, I think Apple should do more than double down on these iPad-style apps on the Mac. I think Apple should go all in and make nearly all of its consumer Mac apps with the new UIKit / Marzipan frameworks, including Mail, Notes, Messages, FaceTime, Photos, Reminders, and Calendar. Apple should just go for it, sooner rather than later, and ideally right now.

My reasoning is pretty simple: whether you think these apps should be the future of macOS development, they’re absolutely coming either way, and Apple should want to ensure that they’re great. The surest way to improve iPad apps on the Mac is for Apple to force its own employees to use them and then fix them.

Unless Apple eats its own UIKit dog food, apps built this way are always going to feel like second-class citizens on the Mac — as though they were built for the iPad first, which many of them are. Right now, the original four Marzipan apps feel like weird alien transplants that don’t belong on a laptop. Unless Apple puts in the work on its own apps to demonstrate best practices and learn where the problems are, those problems will just persist in everybody’s apps. Apple should lead the way and show other developers how to do it right.

I also think Apple should do this development in public, with lots of regular people using them and submitting bug reports on them. It will increase the pressure in a way that an internal private beta never would. Even if these apps are released in a beta, side by side with existing apps, that would be better than not updating them as soon as possible.

I worry that Apple could find itself facing an analogous (though not parallel) quandary to what Microsoft has faced with its own next-generation Windows app framework. Called the “Universal Windows Platform,” it has been fraught with changes in direction and complaints that it was too limiting. It took the company nearly half a decade just to decide what to call them. Worst of all, UWP saw very little adoption as developers stuck with the old way of making apps. Now, even Microsoft might not be very committed to them anymore. The best way to avoid that kind of confusion is to be clear and decisive from the start.

I’m also hopeful (perhaps naively so) that this new Mac framework will be powerful and flexible enough for many different kinds of apps. Just take a perusal through some of the experiments from Steve Troughton-Smith has posted on Twitter. He has found not only that it’s easy to port an iOS app to the Mac, but also that it might be easier than you think to make that app feel Mac-like.

Look, I get it: these new Marzipan apps probably aren’t going to feel as traditionally Mac-like as current Mac apps. One of the Mac’s greatest strengths has always been consistency and predictability in its UI. Marzipan will break that down a little bit. But I maintain that most computer owners are smarter than we give them credit for. They’ll figure it out. It’s not like these new apps will be wildly unfamiliar because they’ll work a lot like iPad apps!

Besides, these new iPad apps on the Mac will surely feel more native than Electron apps do. Electron, if you’re not familiar, is a quick way to turn a web app into a desktop app. There’s a good chance you’re using an Electron app in your workflow right now and don’t realize it. Slack is a good example, as is Simplenote. Electron apps are basically single-use browsers with a bunch of other code thrown in. They can slow your computer down and chew through your battery life because web browsers are not known for being terribly efficient. But Electron apps are easy to make and update.

I use Electron apps. I think a lot of them are great. I also use a lot of web apps, which allow you to separate a browser tab into an “app” you can Cmd-Tab through. I would say 80 percent of the time, I use my MacBook just like it’s a Chromebook. I bet Apple hates that!

If nothing else, iPad apps could save the Mac from memory- and processor-hogging Electron apps. It would have the added benefit (for Apple, anyway) of getting a bunch of people to buy Mac apps from its App Store. There are plenty of companies that maintain an iOS app but have never bothered making a Mac app, and now they might.

When those iOS developers want to make a Mac app, they’re going to need some best practices to follow. Those practices shouldn’t be based on Apple’s best guess or its theories on how a Mac app should feel. They should be based on hard-won, real-world use by tens or hundreds of thousands of users.

That’s why I am hoping Apple will have the courage of its convictions and be willing to release a bunch of its own apps using this framework.

As WWDC nears, I can’t stop thinking about Phil Schiller’s now-infamous line about removing the headphone jack on the iPhone 7 back in 2016. “It really comes down to one word: courage. The courage to move on and do something new that betters all of us. And our team has tremendous courage.”

In the years since, “courage” has become a snarky byword, a shorthand way to crack wise about Apple creating products that have compromises nobody asked for simply in the name of progress. Three years later, the headphone jack issue might be settled for many, but it’s still at least an occasional annoyance for all.

If Apple followed my advice, the word “courage” would definitely apply — likely with the same connotations as before. But for me, its valence would be flipped. In Apple’s world, “courage” represents making tough trade-offs and leaving old legacies behind before they become albatrosses — even when it makes people uncomfortable. That’s exactly what Apple should be willing to do with its Mac apps.

A “courageous” move like that would be unsettling. Would it mean that “legacy” apps are second-class citizens on the Mac? Would there be a long interregnum of Mac app development during the transition? Would we be stuck with a years-long period of two wildly different classes of apps on the Mac? Would it mean that Apple is “dumbing down” the Mac to make it more like the iPad? Will UIKit apps really ever feel like they belong on the Mac? Can they ever be powerful enough?

The answer to all of those questions should be “no.” And Apple is definitely aware that people are worried about all this. Craig Federighi had a somewhat famous WWDC moment last year when he reiterated that macOS and iOS will never “merge” with a giant slide that just said “No.” But getting to that answer will require a long period of uncertainty and angst.

The best way to combat those worries is for Apple to show confidence in its new frameworks — so much so that it’s willing to build its key Mac apps in this new way. That would take courage, but I hear Apple has tremendous amounts of it.

This article is from The Verge