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Apple first made it possible to run iOS apps on a Apple Silicon Mac, now the company has made it easy too.
The moment Apple Silicon Macs became available, it was possible to run iOS apps on it. But it was a ridiculously complicated job and it didn’t really seem like the results were worth it.
you would get one iPhone app on you mac and it would work, but it felt like a fudge, definitely a compromise. Now, two years later, iOS developers may have adapted more — and certainly Apple has made the process easier.
Depending on the app itself and what devices you had, it took between 9 and 15 steps and required at least one additional Mac app to get it done. Now you can just go to the Mac App Store and be done.
There’s a little more to it, but just a little.
How to get iOS apps on your Mac
- Open the Mac App Store app
- Log in if you haven’t already done so
- Click on your name at the bottom left
- On the screen that appears, click iPhone and iPad apps
- Choose a previously purchased app
- Click the iCloud download icon
There is one obvious caveat: you must have already purchased the iOS app. So if it’s something completely new that you want, buy it on your iPhone or iPad before trying this.
But there is another problem, albeit uncommon. What you’re doing is choosing from your history of past purchases, and you could have bought apps with multiple Apple IDs earlier.
Find the desired app that you previously purchased on iOS or iPadOS and click the iCloud download icon
In addition, your shared family purchases will be listed under their name.
So when you click on your name in the bottom left corner of the Mac App Store app, you might get a screen that says No Purchases. If you do, there is a drop-down menu in the top right corner that allows you to switch between users.
Pick one of those and you should see all their purchases and just keep going.
How to run iOS apps on Mac
Once downloaded from the Mac App Store this way, any iOS app you get will work just like any Mac app. To the extent that if you didn’t know where you got it from, it would be impossible to tell it wasn’t a Mac app until you launch it.
Even then, it often happens that the app presents its iPad version to you, so it doesn’t exactly fill the screen, but it looks like a Mac app.
Now launch and run the iOS app as you would a Mac app
Previously, some iOS apps presented their iPhone version on the Mac and that would mean they would get a very narrow window. If a developer hasn’t made an iPad version, or set something up to help it run on the Mac, you’ll get this narrow window and there’s nothing you can do.
In that case, running an iOS app on a Mac still feels like a compromise. But now usually not, and you have a lot of iOS App Store available to you.
But this is opt-in for coders. Developers must explicitly allow the iOS apps to run on macOS.
Practically, this means that your favorite apps may not be available. Or, if there is a specific Mac version, the developer probably won’t allow the iOS version to work.
What this does, however, is open a wide variety of casual games for the Mac. It also gives you some options like using the iOS version of a media player where a native Mac version may not exist.
What it does, however, is remove the hard wall between iOS and macOS software — albeit not for everything.