[pavlov]

"iOS developers who want to sell their product on the Mac App Store" is a rather small subset of developers. I suppose it's nice that they're getting a bit of extra dividend on their existing iOS efforts, but that's pretty much it. Marzipan does nothing for the Mac.

Notably left out from Apple's current direction are existing Mac developers and web developers, whom Apple has been taking for granted for years.

[Roboprog]

One application domain with a largish number of iOS apps is electronic music.

The latency (sample buffer size to prevent drop-out due to preemption) on Android is too high, so mobile music production gravitated to iOS. E.g. - the latency on a $160 iPhone SE is still about half that of a $700 Pixel 2 phone.

[coldtea]

>iOS developers who want to sell their product on the Mac App Store" is a rather small subset of developers

You'd be surprised. There's absolutely no reason to be a "small subset" if it makes men easy money for quick recompile + some small GUI adaptation.

[pavlov]

People with iOS apps on the App Store are a small subset of developers. That's the reality now. Marzipan isn't going to grow that number.

[coldtea]

>People with iOS apps on the App Store are a small subset of developers. That's the reality now. Marzipan isn't going to grow that number.

Of course it is. In fact, that's the main purpose behind its development.

[pavlov]

You think someone who wouldn’t previously have developed an UIKit app is now going to do it because of Marzipan? What’s the incentive?

[coldtea]

No, I think people who have developed a UIKit app are going to port them to OS X because of Marzipan.

The incentive is easy port easy reach of a new, even if smaller, potential market.

To make the idea even clearer, if "porting iOS to OSX with Marzipan" was just a true/false toggle on XCode, almost everybody would toggle it and sell their iOS apps on the Mac App Store -- since it would take no time to do it, and it will reach a few dozens of millions on untapped potential customers (desktop mac users).

Well, it's the same situation, but now with Marzipan instead of trivially easy, like with the imaginary XCode toggle, porting an iOS app will be just "much easier" as opposed to "considerable effort" that it was before.

Also, I understood your comment "People with iOS apps on the App Store are a small subset of developers. That's the reality now." as meaning, "people with iOS on the MAC App Store are a small subset of developers" -- and responded to that.

If you meant: "People with iOS apps on the _iOS_ App Store are a small subset of developers" then that's crazy talk. They are hundreds of thousands of people making iOS apps -- and 1.5 or more million such apps.

[pavlov]

You’re seriously underestimating the support overhead of having a Mac app. There’s way more hardware and software configurations than on iOS. The equation may not play out to make maintaining those Marzipan ports appealing for many.

The amount of UIKit developers is smaller than the amount of publishers. A lot of apps are made in bulk with web wrappers or template engines.

Let’s say there’s 200k UIKit developers in the world. That’s still clearly less than 10% of professional and hobbyist software developers.

[scarface74]

Well, seeing that all of the games that will be part of Apple’s games subscriptions will also be on the Mac and some iOS developers have already said they wanted to have a port ready “day one”....