A few months ago, in December 2017, Mark Gurman reported about a project called ‘Marzipan’, which seemed to be about Apple’s attempts to merge the development of apps for iOS and Mac.
A month later Gurman said in a follow-up report that the project would be included in 2018’s iOS 12 and MacOS 10.14.
However, according to Daring Fireball’s highly experienced Apple analyst, John Gruber, the project is not likely to make its appearance in 2018, and it could be less ambitious that people assumed until now.
Gruber said according to his sources the project no longer carries the codename ‘Marzipan’ and at this stage ‘sounds like a declarative control API’ which does not automatically relate to multi-platform development, but could possibly enable apps to be developed for various user interfaces at the same time.
Gruber said: “It makes sense that if Apple believes that (a) iOS and MacOS should have declarative control APIs, and (b) they should address the problem of abstracting the API differences between UIKit (iOS) and AppKit (MacOS), they would tackle them at the same time.”
He added that maybe the logic was merely that if Apple was going to develop a cross-platform user interface framework, the foundation for such a framework should be a declarative user interface.
Gruber concluded by saying that, whatever Marzipan turns out to be – and what it will eventually be called, he was ‘nearly certain’ that it won’t make its appearance at next months WWDC. He also expressed doubts over the likelihood that it was a 2018 project at all when Gurman released his first report.
With WWDC starting in just over a month from now we will find out who was right soon enough. In the meantime, we will just have to live with separate Mac and iOS apps.