News, Voice Memos, Home, Stocks on macOS will get major updates with Project Catalyst

Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice Ppresident of Software Engineering, tells CNET that last year’s iOS apps for Mac will get a refresh that will arrive in the public beta of MacOS 10.15 Catalina.

The apps are News, Voice Memos, Home, and Stocks. When they first arrived on macOS Mojave in 2018 they were criticized for not taking advantage of the capabilities of the desktop operating system.

Federighi confirmed to CNET that the four iOS apps for Mac released last year will get major updates based on the new technology in Project Catalyst. But he also revealed that the apps will get new designs to make them more Mac-like.

“They’re getting improvements,” Federighi said. “The underlying technology has matured…Some of that is super low-level stuff. Some people have dissected those apps and realized that they were sort of two halves: an AppKit half and a UIKit half, literally running in different processes. That’s all unified now. This has become much more of a native Mac framework…So automatically, the apps we built last year are upgraded.” 

Project Catalyst, previously known as Project Marzipan, is designed to converge development of iOS and macOS apps into a single effort. It’s meant to allow developers to make an app that can work on any iOS or macOS device without needing major changes.