Why no Mac version of Sports, Invites?

[bdinardo]

I thought a few years ago Apple made it easy for developers to create apps that worked on all its platforms -- Mac, iOS, iPadOS (sorry, not a Watch or Vision Pro guy). Why aren't there Mac versions of Sports and Invites? And yes, I know you can do Invites through iCloud, but why not a native app? Sports is the one that frosts me; it's so convenient to have all those scores and all that info in one place on iPhone and iPad to immediately see the games I care about. I wish there were a Mac version of Sports.

 

[!!!]

I thought a few years ago Apple made it easy for developers to create apps that worked on all its platforms

Catalyst is just a lazy way to port iOS apps to Mac, it's just the UIKit framework adapted to support macOS. There's no real effort to support keyboard shortcuts or anything like that, plus it's basically abandoned.

SwiftUI turned out like all the other projects like it, you can't actually "write one UI, run everywhere", there's so much you have to account for the different style of user input, interface, etc. That's not even going into how SwiftUI is simultaneously locked down to a narrow scope yet requires quite a bit of effort to get things to look and feel like everything else on the platform (which you'd have to then repeat for each platform). Adding features Mac users expect to SwiftUI is also a task in it of itself, whereas AppKit makes these things easy.

Mac, iOS, iPadOS

I don't know why you separated iPadOS, it's just a marketing name for iOS so people feel like they're getting something more than a large iPhone that's still locked down.

sorry, not a Watch or Vision Pro guy

And I'm not an iPad guy. As for the watch, that's what SwiftUI started as. You can still see how it's fundamentally so basic, for such simple interfaces on the watch, and then they just went and tacked stuff onto it. The vision pro is, as far as I know, basically just an iOS target with some fancy depth things or whatever.

As for the core reason: iOS is what sells. The iPhone is Apple's cash cow and where they can shove subscriptions in front of the most eyes possible. Everything else is just secondary. Just be glad you got such a good processor hand-me-down and pray Apple doesn't lock your Mac down like some glorified iPad (which is itself a glorified iPhone (which is itself a glorified iPod)).