Report: Apple working on plan for universal iOS/macOS app


Bloomberg:

Starting as early as next year, software developers will be able to design a single application that works with a touchscreen or mouse and trackpad depending on whether it’s running on the iPhone and iPad operating system or on Mac hardware, according to people familiar with the matter.

The context of the change is that the iOS platform is more vibrant with both numbers of apps and updates/features to apps compared to macOS. Certainly, that's reasonable as the iOS platform has seen extraordinary growth over the years and device usage continues trending towards mobile. Presumably, this will mean macOS running iOS applications with appropriate "stuff" required for the user interface and anything else to run on computer hardware vs Apple's iOS platform.

It's been speculated that Apple would eventually move iOS and macOS to a common architecture, either using Intel chips in iOS devices or Apple's custom ARM-based chips in Macs. I don't know if this is a sign of such a roadmap or just a way get developers supporting both of Apple's major platforms.