WildCat's Blog

Fu*k You Apple! You Fooled All Mac Catalyst Developers

Today, I decided to stop all Mac Catalyst related development. The reason is simple: Apple fooled all developers.

Catalyst Never Works

Mac Catalyst looks amazing at the very beginning. The community has a lot of passion of it. For example, Steven Troughton-Smith (funny thread in the appendix) created a lot of amazing hacks of Catalyst, to make apps look like native macOS apps.

However, it is always a second-class citizen. It is always buggy. It is always not working.

For example, many APIs like Live Text works on iOS and macOS (AppKit). But it is just unavailable on Catalyst. This is so stupid. Why Apple doesn’t want to make Catalyst a first-class citizen? When its major Mac apps are being ported to Catalyst, why Apple doesn’t want to make it work? This is so counter-intuitive.

With so much inconsistency, I don’t want to waste my time on Catalyst anymore. Because you will have to write a lot of workarounds to make it work. That means a lot of spaghetti code, like this:

You may think Apple has published a lot of Catalyst apps. But they don’t work well. For example, you cannot pause music of a HomePod using the Home app on macOS. Even their app look silly here.

Hidden Changes of Catalyst Target of clang

I used Rust for some shared logic of my Catalyst app. The Rust code cannot be compiled to Catalyst target anymore since Xcode 13.3. This is because a hidden change of new versions of clang. I could not find it in Apple’s release notes.

You may find a lot of developers investing this issue here: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/106021 How to make Apple accountable for their own platforms and compilers?

Goodbye Catalyst

Starting today, I will stop all Catalyst related development. I will not use Catalyst anymore. I feel sorry of my time wasted on Catalyst. I feel sorry of my users who are waiting for my Catalyst app.

Apple’s dictatorship is so annoying and counter productive. I don’t want to waste my time on its fancy stuff.

Appendix: Funny Thread of Poor Catalyst App Quality from Apple

https://twitter.com/stroughtonsmith/status/1576410599889997825

(Update on Feb 22nd, 2024: due to the account deletion of @stroughtonsmith, this quoted tweet is unavailable anymore. I tried to search for this archive. But haven’t found any.)

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