Apple extends the universal purchase option to Mac apps

The effort to bring iPad apps to Mac — Catalyst — has now reached the doorstep of universal purchase.

The company astounded the Apple developer community with the official announcement made yesterday that starting March 2020, developers would be able to sell their cross-platform applications (iOS, iPad, macOS, tvOS) as one universal purchase. This means that customers can enjoy their applications on multiple platforms by making the purchase only once.

This offers an incredible opportunity for the developers to provide their app for several platforms as a package or a combination of several apps. This, additionally, allows them to sync customer in-app purchases and subscriptions, which was a scattered mess before.

All thanks to Xcode 11.4 beta which made this a reality. However, this is not a mandatory scenario. Any developer who chooses to take advantage of this feature will have to bundle together different versions of an app into a single Universal Purchase.

There is a high possibility that a number of developers might not think this to be a great idea and you may end up buying some apps the old fashioned way.

In order for this transformation to take a shape, App Store categories will be united across the Mac and iOS App Store, making the apps more ‘discoverable’ as stated by Apple.

It is something of a big deal for Apple since it only has updated its categories once in a blue moon. This will notably impact not only those iPhone app developers with a bundle but also the ones without it.

Assumingly, developers would benefit from the new categorization (rank on top of the list of Top apps) by listing their app in new categories. Rather than competing in the old categories with a sea of other apps.

There are going to be two new categories on iOS App Store — ‘Graphics & Design’ and ‘Developer Tools’. As for the Mac App Store, there are several, namely — ‘Books’, ‘Food & Drink’, Magazines & Newspapers’, ‘Navigation’, and ‘Shopping’.

More so, the previous categories on Mac ‘Photography’ and ‘Video’ would be combined into one category ‘Photo & Video’ and ‘kids’ will no longer be a category in ‘Games’; now isn’t that neat.

Says Apple, in addition to adding new platforms to existing app records, developers can choose to also create a new app for these platforms with the help of a single app record in App Store Connect.

This functionality would be added as a default to Mac Catalyst apps (introduced in macOS Catalina update) and will be made available to non-Catalyst apps.

The universal purchase option is not an entirely new concept as far as we know. This is something Apple has been doing by giving away the iPad/Apple Watch apps with iPhone apps. What’s new is that this is the first time for Mac apps.

It is possible for developers to download Xcode 11.4 beta now since it was released yesterday, but it will not go live until March.

This release was followed by other macOS and iOS betas, together bringing a new set of features like head pointer tech, screen time communication limits for Mac, more Memoji stickers, iCloud folder sharing, and CarPlay updates.