One of the main benefits of moving from Mac to Apple’s M1 chipset is that users will be able to run applications for iPhone and iPad natively. But that was one of the areas I never came across with my articles on Mac Mini (M1). So, let’s take a look at how this compatibility works now, with the understanding that this is a moving target and that things should continually improve in the future.
This type of application compatibility for iPhone and iPad depends on the M1 chip: Macs running on Intel hardware can only run applications that have been converted to Mac through Catalyst. But finding compatible apps for iPhone and iPad is the first challenge. A quick Google search provided the obvious answer: these apps are available on the Mac App Store, which makes perfect sense. From what I can see, Apple doesn’t mention iPhone and iPad apps in the Store, nor does it offer a special area where you can find those apps. Instead, there are two main methods for installing apps for iPhone and iPad.
The first is to use search. For example, if you search for Microsoft Office on the Mac App Store, you will get a Mac Apps results page by default. But you can select the “iPhone and iPad apps” link to see the available mobile apps.
These specific results are … disappointing. The results of Mac Apps include Microsoft 365, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel and so on, as you would expect. But iPhone and iPad app results show only third-party apps and utilities. Searches for terms like “Microsoft Word” work in a similar way.
So, why is that? It’s because the Mac App Store doesn’t simply present all iPhone and iPad apps to Mac users. Instead, developers should choose to include their mobile apps in the Mac App Store. And Microsoft, which already makes full-featured desktop applications for Mac, chose not to.
The second method for finding iPhone and iPad apps on the Mac App Store is to view the list of apps (and games) that you previously downloaded on an i-Device. They are available through your profile image in the lower left corner of the Mac App Store: Click it to display the Account page, which shows your previously downloaded Mac apps in reverse chronological order. Then click on the “iPhone and iPad apps” link to show these apps.
As with the search-based example above, this list will be filtered to show only the apps you’ve downloaded that are compatible with the Mac App Store. I don’t know when I downloaded Microsoft Office for iPhone, for example, but it doesn’t matter. It’s not on the list. (In addition, some sort of switching that would allow these applications to be displayed alphabetically or by category would be fine.)
If you look carefully at the applications that appear, you will see that some are indicated with the text “Designed for iPad” (or iPhone). These applications also work on the Mac. Some applications have a note like “Designed for iPhone. Not checked for macOS ”, and these … well, they haven’t really been tested, so who knows how well they will work? I assume that this simply means that the developer has approved the inclusion of the app in the Mac App Store (and I hope this indicates some level of confidence in its compatibility and performance).
To test how these apps work, I selected some iPhone and iPad apps that I had previously downloaded. HBO Max, for example, was designed for the iPad and therefore should work well. It starts fast enough and seems to work fine, and like other iPad apps, it appears in an iPad-shaped window that takes up about 50 percent of the screen by default.
There is no way to resize by itself, but you can at least maximize it, which makes it full screen, and in this mode, there are empty areas to the left and right of the application screen because iPads have 4: 3 screens and Macs have wider 16:10 screens.
After the initial excitement of seeing an iPad application running on the Mac passed, some harsh realities emerged. Using HBO Max to play the Die Hard movie, I can see that this wide aspect film now has empty black areas at the top and bottom of the film screen, which is normal, and on the right and left as well: Again, the app is oriented to a 4: 3 screen, so you cannot play the movie in a real full screen mode.
(The red area indicates where the movie is playing, as you cannot take a screenshot of it)
So bad, typical keyboard commands – like tapping the space bar to play / pause – don’t work. Instead, you must use the mouse to emulate finger taps on the screen. Therefore, you can click in the middle of the screen to show the controls and then click the Play button to pause playback. It’s a little tedious. (Touching the Esc key while in full screen mode reverts the application to window mode, which is a good thing.)
This is, of course, application specific. It is possible for a developer to adapt an application for iPhone or iPad to work better on a Mac. HBO did not do this for HBO Max, and my guess is that it will not because it already has a complete web application that works great on Mac. But that’s up to them.
The Doodle Jump game for iPhone is another cautionary tale: this game is several years old – apparently, I first installed it on August 2, 2009 – but it is listed as “Designed for iPhone”, so it should work. In that case, I never found out: Doodle Jump appears in a tiny window the size of an iPhone and cannot be resized either.
That said, the full-screen experience is very good and similar to what you see when you run an iPhone application with zoom on an iPad.
But playing Doodle Jump was beyond my abilities. You can tap buttons like Play and Multiplayer to make things happen, but once you’re in a game, it’s not clear how you control the small sprite on the screen. On a phone, you can tilt your device left and right to move it, and you can tap the screen to shoot. On a Mac, there is no way to tilt what I can imagine, although clicking when the mouse cursor is over the game shoots.
These two apps are great examples of … something? Maybe not. But when I think about the types of mobile apps I can see using on a desktop system like the Mac, it’s a very short list. And Apple makes it tedious to even find out what’s out there. I did some research for mobile apps that I could imagine I’d like to use, like Spotify, Fitbit and Instagram, but none of them are currently available on the Mac. There are no Google apps there. No Microsoft applications. Etc.
Given that, this is a topic that I will review in the future. For now, I will just say that the performance looks excellent and that compatibility is the main problem. Not only via availability, but also because some of the applications available don’t work as well. But I hope that will change.
Marked with Apple M1, MacBook Pro