Why doesn't Apple make all iOS apps available on M1 Macs?

[singularity0993]

Apple gave developers the option to prevent their apps from running on M1 Macs, citing that this may lead to poor user experience. From my perspective this is quite anti-user: this is a Mac, a fully-featured computer in which the user should be able to do whatever he wants! Users should be given the option to install whatever software that is capable of running, as long as it is legal. After all, suboptimal user experience is better than nothing, and this will also encourage developers to make macOS apps to optimize the experience. But instead, Apple went further into preventing even the power users (who knows what they are doing) from sideloading iOS apps. And now iOS apps on macOS is pretty much a joke.

You see, Steve Jobs made all iPhone apps available on iPad, even though the experience was suboptimal. Because of this the iPad became significantly more useful during its early stages when the ecosystem isn't complete, and I haven't heard any complaints about this -- if you don't like iPhone apps on iPad, just don't install.

Now we still have many apps that support only iOS, Android and Windows but not macOS, e.g. Genshin Impact. These apps are clearly capable of running on macOS but the developer chose not to make it available, even without plans of making a native macOS version. If we were given the option to run all iOS apps on macOS just like running iPhone apps on iPad, this would have been a different story.

 

[Sheepish-Lord]

To be fair there's no other platform to my knowledge that shares an ecosystem like Apple so taking apps from a mobile OS to a desktop OS only exists in Apple. As you've already alluded to its about optimization and ease of use which is why people tend to choose Apple products. Not saying you're full of it but you have no idea why Steve Jobs did what he did or said what he said, nobody does, and if you haven't heard about complaints it's because you haven't been around long enough or talked to enough people who have as there were plenty.

It's pretty obvious Apple is always attempting to be efficient, easy to use, and as consistent of an experience across all their devices. And while at times it doesn't work out it's still better than what I left behind (Android/Windows). I don't care about side loading apps or customizing a thousand different things, I just want the options that are there to work really well.

 

[MajorFubar]

Apple gave developers the option to opt-out. And opt-out they did. So technically it's not Apple's fault.

You see, Steve Jobs made all iPhone apps available on iPad, even though the experience was suboptimal. Because of this the iPad became significantly more useful during its early stages when the ecosystem isn't complete, and I haven't heard any complaints about this -- if you don't like iPhone apps on iPad, just don't install.

If Apple hadn't done that, the first iPads would have only been good as door wedges. It's different on the Mac.

 

[Basic75]

You see, Steve Jobs made all iPhone apps available on iPad, even though the experience was suboptimal. Because of this the iPad became significantly more useful during its early stages when the ecosystem isn't complete, and I haven't heard any complaints about this -- if you don't like iPhone apps on iPad, just don't install.

When the iPad came out there were hardly any iPad specific applications that the iPhone version was in competition with.

Here the situation is different, some developers don't want you to use the cheaper mobile version of the same software on your Mac.

 

[Lord Hamsa]

App developers choose to opt out in many cases because they don't want to have to deal with support issues on the extra platform (and in some cases, they have a higher-priced desktop version available).

Also, there are a large number of apps that require the specialized sensors, etc., on a mobile device - e.g., anything that needs input from the gyro sensors won't work on a Mac.