Do You Use It? iPhone and iPad Apps on M-series Macs

How about that—I had no idea. However, the only app I would be interested in using on my Mac doesn’t show up in my purchased apps, even though a lot of other free apps do, and a search comes up dry: Substack.app.

See my thread last year on sheet music management software for iPad. One of the main deciding features for MobileSheets over iGigBook Pro was that the dev enabled support for running on a Mac which vastly improved my workflow, since the Mac is also where I create most of my scores in the first place.

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Just tried this for the first time… put some of my iPad games on the Studio … works great!

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The MacOS and iOS versions of 1Password are separate downloads.

Yes, but I see the same thing, and I’m definitely using the Mac version of 1Password on my Mac. In the Get Info dialog, 1Password and the other oddities are identified as Application (Apple silicon), whereas normal apps are either Application (Universal) or Application (Intel). I wonder if 1Password is actually installing an Apple silicon-only version of itself and thus falls into that category.

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Very interesting aspect (and possibly worthy of its own thread).

I too have 3 apps on my 14" MBP that claim to be of kind Apple silicon: Zoom, Dropbox, and Rosetta 2 Updater. On the other hand, interestingly enough, the one app I routinely use on the Mac that I know is an iPhone-only app is not listed as Apple Silicon. It instead reports to be of kind iOS.

Rosetta makes sense not being of kind Universal. I don’t know what makes Zoom and Dropbox special. For sure these are apps that have updated themselves, but that does not distinguish them from the dozens of other apps I have that also update themselves. And these are also not the only apps I have that will not run on Intel…

In System Information when I list all apps of kind iOS, to my surprise, not only that one iPhone app I downloaded from the MAS shows up, but also VLC which I am certain did not come via MAS but rather just a regular download from videolan.org. By the way, even though in System Information VLC reports as being of kind iOS, in a Finder Get Info window it will state Application (Apple silicon), just like Zoom or Dropbox.

No idea why this apparent inconsistency. I’m sure one of the Mac developers on this board will be able to shed light on the matter though.

[BTW, is it just me or is it odd that Apple would not capitalize silicon in Apple silicon? After all, it’s not Apple music either.]

Hmm. On my 2012 Mini, I have 1Password 7.9.11 (updated 7/26/2023) running on Catalina. Haven’t tried replacing it with a new copy from the website, but it lets me download a new installer. Maybe it senses what I’m running. Or maybe I’m misunderstanding the issue. Do that a lot.

On an Intel-based Mac from 2012, there’s no way you could run an iOS app (or an Apple silicon-only app), so I don’t think anything would identify itself as such. What we’re hitting is apps that are definitely not iOS apps showing up as such in certain places.

I just wanted to let you know in case you didn’t, that libbyapp.com is now available. I realize an ebook reading app is much better than a website, but I love using libbyapp.com to look up books and perhaps check them out. Then I can read them on my iPad. (It’s also possible to read the books in the website.) Libby used to work only on iOS devices, not desktops, so I was delighted when I stumbled onto the web app, as my ‘discovery’ of books is often at my desk, and I can quickly see if the book is at my library. Libby is fantastic (now it even searches across all my libraries if the book isn’t at the currently-set library)!
And thanks for teaching me something, because I hadn’t thought about loading the Libby iOS app on my Mac.

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And why so many app developers refuse to check that little “enable” flag, I just don’t understand. Yes, there are a few (very few) apps which depend on a specific screen size. But if you’re not making a desktop version, why would you lock out potential users by keeping your app iOS-only? My church’s web app is not findable in the App Store, and that little trick to getting iOS apps onto Mac without the App Store was killed off a while ago. I’d love to be able to have church messaging on my desktop alongside all my other messages, so I could actually know somebody sent me one & be able to read and reply in a timely fashion. Forcing iOS apps not to install on Mx Macs is just short-sighted foolishness to me.

Developers may have valid reasons. The one I spoke to had written a weather app. It gathers info from various sources and presents it on the screen. He is concerned that if it was able to run on a Mac, people would leave it running all the time, hitting those websites every few minutes and potentially getting blocked by the web site.

The obvious reason is because you don’t want the burden of supporting a second platform.