Tired of having to purchases iOS apps and macOS apps separately? The good news is that Apple now supports universal purchasing between iOS, macOS, iPadOS, tvOS and watchOS.
Apple announced it now allows developers to enable universal purchases with the new XCode 11.4 beta dev tool.
For Apple users, this means one convenient purchase will be enough for the app to work on all devices.
Not only this but in-app purchases will now apply across both iOS and macOS.
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The bad news though is that it’s up to developers whether they want to use Apple’s new universal purchasing feature.
For developers, separate purchases across different platforms makes complete sense as each platform requires maintaining separately, creating more work for them.
And of course, it’s more lucrative to sell an app separately across platforms than charge one fee to use the app on them all.
The move is part of Apple’s attempt to unify macOS and iOS through Mac Catalyst which was launched with macOS 10.15 Catalina earlier this year.
Catalyst apps are based on Apple’s UIKit software framework which saves developers having to rewrite an entire separate macOS desktop app using the traditional APPKit software.
So far though, not many developers have flocked to use the relatively complex UIKit software framework to create macOS apps so it will be interesting to see whether this new move by Apple will encourage or discourage more developers to start using it.
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