While Apple announced no plans to merge iOS and macOS at last year’s Worldwide Developers Conference, the company did state that it’s working on a way for developers to write apps that work on both operating systems.
Project Marzipan, which has been kept relatively quiet, currently serve as some of the back end for Apple’s News, Stocks, Home, and Voice Memos applications that arrive with macOS 10.14 Mojave.
On Wednesday, it was reported that Marzipan could be in the spotlight for this year’s WWDC. It’s thought that Apple could release a software development kit at the conference that will allow iPad developers to port their apps to the Mac. Then, in 2020, Apple will release a kit that ports iPhone apps to the Mac. By 2021, Apple will give developers the ability to create a “single binary” of an app—in other words, one app that can run on Mac, iPad, and iPhone.
This, in turn, could allow developers to write a single set of code that would run on different platforms, making app creation that much easier. While developers would still have to figure out the interface differences between macOS and iOS, it would allow them to create and sell a single App Store item rather than separate ones for different platforms.
Stay tuned for additional details as they become available.