[paulryanrogers]

Curious that many Mac apps brand themselves as such. MacOS as a platform it's functional, though if I didn't have to support Safari for day job I'd prefer an OS that respects user choice.

Cross platform and native are my preferences for apps these days, and in that order.

[yeskia]

I think there's still demand for native Mac apps. Look how many people are disappointed to see 1Password go from native to Electron. Sketch, Pixelmator, Nova are just some examples of quality native Mac apps that are doing well.

[Wowfunhappy]

When an app explicitly brands itself as a Mac app, they usually mean that it's a Cocoa app. If you really live on the Mac, the difference is palpable in most cases.

Many of Apple's own apps are no longer Cocoa, and IMO that really speaks to how much they care about the platform, even in the age of Apple Silicon.

[paulryanrogers]

Can you remind me what's the difference? I thought Cocoa was older and Swift is the future, so wouldn't Swift be the most performant and beautiful choice?

[piperswe]

Cocoa is the user interface toolkit used by macOS and iOS applications alike (though on iOS it's called Cocoa Touch). Swift is a programming languages that's often used to write Cocoa applications, usually through the AppKit, UIKit, or SwiftUI frameworks.

[Wowfunhappy]

I'll add that I think GP is confusing Cocoa with Objective-C. Swift does replace Objective-C.