The much-rumored cross-platform app support that is said to be planned for iOS and macOS will hit devices with the release of macOS 10.15 and iOS 13 rather than macOS 10.14 and iOS 12 as has been rumored, says Daring Fireball’s John Gruber.
Gruber says that while the “scuttlebutt” he’s hearing about an Apple cross-platform project indicates such a project is indeed in the works, it won’t happen this year.
I’m nearly certain this project is not debuting at WWDC 2018 in June, and I doubt that 2018 was on the table in December. It’s a 2019 thing, for MacOS 10.15 and iOS 13. I would set your expectations accordingly for this year’s WWDC.
News of possible cross-platform support for apps that would run on both the macOS and iOS platforms was first reported by Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman back in December. Gurman said Apple would introduce the cross-platform support at this June’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference.
How would this all work? Gurman shares what he’s heard from his “little birdies” familiar with the matter:
There’s nothing inherently cross-platform about a declarative control API. But 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. Or perhaps the logic is simply that if they’re going to create a cross-platform UI framework, the basis for that framework should be a declarative user interface.
We’ll keep you posted about any other info we hear about this. For more about what is currently known, visit the Daring Fireball blog.