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Have you ever noticed that when you build an iOS app for Mac Catalyst, $PLATFORM_NAME is set to `macosx`?

When Catalyst was being hashed out, there was quite a bit of discussion around whether we were building against the *iOS* SDK on the Mac, or against a *Mac* SDK that happened to know about iOS. As you can guess in retrospect, the latter worldview prevailed: the Catalyst SDK is a “variant” of the Mac SDK. This made our builder tools folks quite happy, because the Catalyst SDK could be built alongside the Mac one, and Catalyst apps and daemons bundled with macOS could be built together with the rest of macOS.

Xcode, however, seems to continue to insist in its UI that Catalyst apps are actually *iOS* apps that happen to support the Mac.

Which worldview you choose to believe is up to you! I know which one I prefer.

#xcode #macCatalyst #ios #macOS #developers #lore