This. There's a thriving open source ecosystem around iOS that is largely unavailable to macOS developers because of fairly arbitrary and unnecessary API differences in frameworks.
Unifying the API will open a lot of doors for macOS devs to use iOS libraries and provide a boost to macOS development.
I think those thinking about UI convergence are missing the point, and it's doubtful that this is what Apple has in mind. Having unified APIs makes dev life easier, and having official linkages between desktop and mobile apps makes it easier to do things like document sharing between mobile and desktop versions, or sharing of purchases (so you don't have to buy the desktop/mobile version twice).
Agreed, and also encourage development of desktop counterparts to popular mobile apps - if you can keep the vast majority of your business logic and middle-layers (and largely just have to implement new UI), that's a huge load off of dev teams.
I'm thinking things like a FB Messenger desktop app - certainly a lot easier to implement.
And hopefully even move some players away from the ever-popular not-quite-native desktop apps (looking at you, Slack and Spotify) towards more actually-native UIs.
> And hopefully even move some players away from the ever-popular not-quite-native desktop apps (looking at you, Slack and Spotify) towards more actually-native UIs.
That’s the dream, but I’m not optimistic. More than likely they’ll just add another target to their Electron/React app and call it a day.
Unifying the API will open a lot of doors for macOS devs to use iOS libraries and provide a boost to macOS development.
I think those thinking about UI convergence are missing the point, and it's doubtful that this is what Apple has in mind. Having unified APIs makes dev life easier, and having official linkages between desktop and mobile apps makes it easier to do things like document sharing between mobile and desktop versions, or sharing of purchases (so you don't have to buy the desktop/mobile version twice).