I work on a large, complex, well-respected iOS app. Some of our main competition is desktop apps, and we've often been asked for a macOS version. M1 Macs can ru

I work on a large, complex, well-respected iOS app. Some of our main competition is desktop apps, and we've often been asked for a macOS version. M1 Macs can run our app natively now, and we've done some work to make that a better experience than it would be by default. We've also spend some time seeing about using Catalyst to bring the app to the Mac for real. As a longtime Mac developer, I'm not super impressed. It's cool to get a build going for macOS quickly, but the effort required to make a non-trivial Catalyst app not suck turns out to be very significant. I would definitely not even dream of using it to build a Mac-first/Mac-only app. The (debatable) advantages of UIKit over AppKit are just not even close to enough to outweigh the difficulty involved in making a good Catalyst app. The benefit of Catalyst is bringing an existing iOS codebase over and/or sharing code between platforms. It is not a better way to make a Mac app on its own merits.