Catalyst: why not?
Just a curiosity, why not to develop a Catalyst app for macOS users using code from iOS app? I’m not a developer so I might be wrong, but UI and UX would be a lot more like a native macOS app and resource usage should be way lower than electron. I think Dashlane moved in that direction…
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That's a really good question! Given a choice between a Catalyst app and Electron, Catalyst gets things about a million percent closer to being a "proper" Mac UI experience.
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I think there are probably two reasons:
- It still requires them to fork off a separate development for desktop apps, when they want to just have one.
- I don't think Catalyst is going to be a thing. Apple didn't even mention it in their last WWDC keynote. It seems like something that never took off.
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I don’t agree with point 2: many stock apps in Monterey have been substituted with catalyst counterpart and Apple developed new APIs for macOS 12: https://developer.apple.com/mac-catalyst/
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Well, they've already got a bunch of platform-specific stuff going on for their Mac desktop build: see, for example, all of the discussion about the Swift code in the back-end, as well as whatever extensive customizations they are doing in order to make the current Electron-based UI as sorta-Mac-like as they've thus far managed to make it. So the "write once, run anywhere" horse has already left the barn.
Point #2 is more compelling, to me, but who even knows what Apple's platform strategy is. Enough of the built-in OSX apps are built using Catalyst that it doesn't seem like it'll be going anywhere in the immediate future...
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I'd love to see how it is going to look like once we have the new iOS app finished and ready. It is not anywhere close to the public beta yet and after how our first public Mac build went, I feel that we should probably keep it this way for longer. We also need to finish the existing 1Password 8 Mac app, if only to support the older platforms where Catalyst is not available.
Off the top of my head, there are quite a few features in the desktop app that are not available on mobile:
- keyboard shortcuts
- menubar item
- launch services integration
- encrypted backups (not 100% sure about this one)
- browser integration
- updater with beta/nightly builds
- etc.
Also, pretty sure that signing into the account and the auto-lock service work differently on mobile.
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I might be mistaken, but doesn't Catalyst provide APIs for keyboard shortcuts and NSMenuItems? And you can totally do launchd/helper apps/processes with Catalyst apps as well, in much the same way that presumably you are having to with the current Electron solution. Of course, Catalyst would not be a slam-dunk one-click port, but Electron isn't a one-click-cross-platform solution, either, as you have surely discovered- and at least with Catalyst you'd be able to benefit on MacOS from all of the spit and polish that you'll presumably be putting into the iOS app (as opposed to having to try and play "Platform UI Edge Case Whack-a-Mole" in Electron).
And hey, I also wanted to say thank you for listening to all of our feedback and engaging so seriously with the community. Nobody likes to hear their work get critiqued (putting it mildly), and that's doubly true when it's still a work-in-progress. Putting it out here for us all to look at and respond to was really brave.
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@StevenBedrick, Thank you so much!
I feel that we certainly jumped the gun with a huge announcement. That didn't give us any time to address the obvious issues in the current build and we are paying for it now.
I agree with you and if we could make the Catalyst option work well, we will. It is too early to plan anything around it because we need to ship the iPhone/iPad apps first. And we still need the option that supports earlier versions of macOS.
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@roustem Well, it is a pretty big set of changes that you've announced- big, fundamental ones to aspects of the product that are absolutely core to how people use it (subscription pricing and storing secrets on a remote server), and then simultaneously a major UI overhaul in a way that involves grabbing the third rail of modern software development (Electron) for the world's pickiest and most opinionated group of users (Mac users, myself included). And all in the context of an app that people have... very strong feelings about, probably because a) it stores incredibly important and sensitive data, and b) we interact with it dozens of times during the course of a day for a variety of different workflows. Oh, yeah, and doing it during a pandemic, heat wave, and really bad fire season, so people are maybe not in the best possible head-space to be dealing with change in a rational manner. Oh, and doing it all over the Internet, a communications medium that makes nuance and subtlety in communication basically impossible. So, yeah... that's what I would call "playing on the highest difficulty setting" 🤣
But hey, at least this way you're getting a lot of extra eyeballs on that new version! So that's something... seriously, though, better to have gotten this out early. The story now can be one of "hey, look at how much memory usage has improved since the first early access release" and "we were able to make the keyboard shortcuts work" instead of having had this... experience... take place closer to the actual release. Some of the issues people have been bringing up are intentional design decisions that you guys clearly aren't going to move on, and I will admit to being disappointed about some of that, but given the way you and your team have been engaging with the forums, you're showing that many of the UI/UX details will get ironed out. Seeing that you care about those kinds of details and design issues gives me more confidence in other parts of the product, like the cloud storage and syncing for secrets. Of course, the inverse of that statement is true, and I wonder how much of people's complaining about the Electron UI is due to that anxiety?
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