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Apple has made efforts to make it easy for iOS developers to build Mac apps, and a few have. Here’s how to find what’s available in macOS Ventura.
It’s now literally a checkbox in Xcode for a developer to produce a macOS version of their iOS app – if they don’t mind the Mac app being trash. To create one that works well on the Mac, looks good, and performs a useful function, it takes more work.
So far, it seems like that’s not the job the developers have been rushing to do. Anecdotally, it looks like the iPadOS devs may be more up for it as they may be closer to the Mac in appearance, but it’s still not a gold rush.
Which means that all Apple Silicon Mac owners have this ability to run iPhone and iPad apps on their Macs, but it’s hard to find what can work.
You will always have to decide what works well for you on a Mac. To simply find which iOS and iPadOS apps will physically run on macOS Ventura, you can do two things.
How to view Apple’s list of iPadOS apps running on macOS Ventura
- Open the Mac App Store
- Click on Discover
- Scroll to iPhone and iPad apps for Mac with Apple Silicon
- Click on See everything To the right
This section of the Mac App Store is not a hardwired button, it’s a promotional listing. So Apple could retire it, or Apple could rename it, at any time.
Apple has curated a selection of iOS apps for Mac. It’s not a flood.
If it is there when you check then what you will get by clicking See everything is a surprisingly paltry list of apps. At the time of writing, it displays around 40 titles, including some major ones such as LumaFusion and Flighty.
How to Find a New iPad App That Will Work on an Apple Silicon Mac
- Open the Mac App Store
- Click in the search field at the top left
- Enter a search term or app name and press Return
- In the list of applications that appear, click iPhone and iPad apps at the top
Apple makes it better and better. It used to take 15 absurd steps to find an iOS app and then run it on your Mac, for example.
In the Mac App Store, search for a title or subject, then click on the iPhone and iPad apps section
Then Apple made this Mac App Store search work, but only for iOS and iPadOS apps you’ve already purchased.
Now you can search for anything anytime and find it. Or at least nothing from Apple or the Mac App Store gets in your way.
Instead, it’s now only about whether developers have decided to allow their iOS apps to run on the Mac. When they are present and you have found them, you can simply click on Install Where Obtain and download them to your Mac as if they were Mac applications.
