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Your hypothetical future and mine must be in different timelines. Besides, I've no interest at all in using desktop for most DAW tasks. So, it has little appeal for me.
Nevermind. I want to go home go rethink my life.
Easy there.... I’m eventually going to get around to all my shimmery reverbs. Probably working on a baker’s dozen.
In all seriousness - many of the iOS apps are priced too low. I agree.
Price is a hard thing to set. Too high, everything gets stolen. On the desktop everything gets stolen anyway though. I've had software I give away for free "cracked" and traded. That's part of the reason I don't really have a ton of motivation to write software on the desktop.
The end result of this iOS apps on macOS ploy is going to be a bunch of ad supported garbage on the Mac App Store.
This was interesting... https://www.macrumors.com/2020/11/18/apple-m1-mac-tidbits/
Running iOS Apps Using .ipa Files
MacRumors reader Amy tells us that she's able to run iOS apps that are not available on the Mac App Store on Apple Silicon apps using .ipa files.
Legitimate .ipa files that are downloaded from iTunes or something like an iMazing backup can be double-clicked and installed on an Apple Silicon Mac and they run as if they're on an iOS device. Amy says that she's used this method to install Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, Spotify, and more, even though those apps are not available through the Mac App Store.
Shh ... if Apple reads that ...
[edit - actually maybe not. They do seem to want to get as many iOS apps on the new Macs as possible to tempt more people to buy them. Probably an intentional "slip".]
If this is true and Apple doesn't plug it up quickly, there are going to be some really pissed big companies that charge a bunch more for their Mac apps than they do for their iOS version.
I've been doing a bunch of testing of iOS audio apps on the M1 Mini so I wanted to kinda update this thread with what I've found. To really cut to the point, don't blame the devs for withholding their hosts and AU's from the macOS App store. At least as far as audio apps go, this is not ready for prime time yet.
I've used a not quite legit method to load a some hosts and AU's on the Mini. The results are very mixed, especially for the hosts. The good side is that the audio for the hosts works well. The bad side is that there's a whole bunch of state, configuration, and UI stuff that would be very frustrating for users. The disappearing AUv3 thing happens here too with iOS apps.
For AU's it's kinda similar. Audio works for the most part, but GUI's can be a mess and there is a complete show stopper bug in macOS that blows up an iOS AU whenever the scroll wheel of a mouse is touched or if more that an one finger gesture happens on the trackpad. What makes it worse is that GB, MS, and Logic seem to think this has corrupted the host and force a restart when it looks to me like the audio is actually still fine and only the sandboxed AU UI has crashed. I've filed a bug report with Apple on this one and it would be great if others who have seen the issue would file reports too.
On the good side of things, I've used mainstage, GB, and Reaper on the M1 Mini now and they all perform really well even in only 8GB of RAM. Really well! I'm completely impressed with how well the Apple Silicon version of Reaper is working and other than the UI bug, all of the iOS AU's are running in Reaper fine. This is actually going to be pretty slick once the kinks are worked out.
Do you think korg gadget 2 would work on M1 chips? i read a comment somewhere... that someone run its free version fine.
Korg Gadget has a dedicated Mac version for some time already, so you don't need M1 to run it.
I don't have Gadget, so I don't know how well it runs. But, everything from iPadOS is going to pretty much run under macOS 11 on the Apple Silicon chips. The things that aren't going to run well are those things that use gestures and sensors from the iPad that none of the Macs have.
My guess though is that developers are going to start putting checks in their applications to see what platforms they are running on and start shutting themselves down if they are the wrong platform. I'd also guess that Apple is going to be getting pressure from companies like MS and Adobe to stop iOS apps from running on macOS if the company hasn't explicitly allowed it. I really doubt if the current situation is going to last.
The iOS/iPadOS developers can simply opt-out from the Mac app store and Apple actually communicated them to consider it if they can't support their apps on M1 Macs.
Korg already sell Mac version of Gadget so it makes no sense for them to offer iOS/iPadOS version that is ran over some emulator and only for owners of M1 Macs and for cheaper price, while it's the same product, just not optimized.
Yeah, the dev can opt-out, but this doesn't stop the users from using a tool that Apple provides to get the app on the Mac anyway. And once the app has been grabbed off the store, there are going to be sites that will illegally distribute them. These things were bound to happen once Apple decided to support running iPad apps on the Mac. For most iOS applications and developers, it won't really matter. MacOS is a much smaller market than iOS and will be a new source of revenue for the apps that do work there. The big companies though, that make most of their money off high priced programs on the Mac, aren't going to like this.
Edit to clarify: The tool I mention above is Apple configurator 2. It's free from Apple. Don't pay money to the people that make the non-legit tool to do this.
For any devs that are following this discussions, here's what I think is an interesting thing to consider.
I woke up in the middle of the night a couple of nights ago with the thoughts of my iOS AUv3's crashing Logic and for some reason decided to get up and just port them to macOS. So, I opened up Xcode and clicked the little box to enable Catalyst, compiled and ran the AU in GB, and and everything worked fine. I've done this now with all the AU's I have released and a couple I use internally. The only things I've had to deal with by hand are replacing some gestures I use in the UI with mouse based alternatives. All of the bugs that are breaking the AU's on macOS are gone once I enable Catalyst for the AU.
One major upside to doing this using Catalyst is that you can now test how your iOS AUv3 is going to work on macOS using an X86 based Mac.
The major caveat that I should mention is that I do all my SIMD/vector based stuff using the Accelerate framework. If you use direct Arm SIMD or assembly, this is obviously going to be much harder. I do use a bunch of other Apple frameworks in the AU's though, SceneKit, SpriteKit, Metal, etc, and all of that does work under Catalyst.
It's worth checking out if this will work with your apps. If nothing else, you can get a feel for how this is going to work without having to buy an M1 based Mac.
I didn't know there's a way to get an app out of iOS device when developer does not let it published on Mac app store...? I understand that once it's published for Mac, there is definitely a way how to distribute it on and do basically whatever you want with that. Maybe with jailbroken device? Are there some sources already distributing iOS apps outside app store?
[...]
There are multiple ways to get the packaged app for iOS. Some are legit and some aren't. The Apple tool I mentioned is designed for corporate provisioning of iDevices. It's a completely legitimate use case and would be a requirement for deploying large numbers of iPads or iPhones in a corporate or school setting. Any end user can actually use it to get the apps that they've purchased on the app store on to their device in a bulk like manner. There's no need for a jailbreak to do this.
This method will only let you add applications that you have legitimate access to on your iOS devices to your M1 Mac. It does let you run apps that the dev has opted-out of running on macOS. This is what I think Apple will plug-up soon.
I have no idea if there are sites making exploits available yet. Past experience tells me that it won't take long.
On a related note, this could all be good for the big devs in the end. My perspective is that they way over-charge for their stuff. Going all the way back to mp3 on the iPod, it's been shown multiple times that charging less and making it easier to get the product raises profits for the developer. If the big music devs want to survive, they are going to have to change their models. Apple has for Logic (you don't get gouged for updates and the price is much cheaper now). FL Studio is another example of a better pricing model. Places like NI and Waves drive me nuts. They want to charge me new (physical) instrument like prices every year just to keep their stuff running. Waves is really annoying. They charge more for an update than they do to buy the product new again on one of their bundle sales!
I remember a bunch of articles from game developers in the early days of iOS talking about the point that they made more profit off of the 99 cent version of their game on the iPhone than they had in years of selling it for $60 on the PC and consoles.
It's going to take some time to see how this all shakes out, but this has the potential to move the market on the Mac (and the PC by follow-on) for audio applications. It's going to be interesting to see how it develops.
Thanks for clarification, that's definitely interesting as it seems piracing apps at least to run o M1 macs will be much easier, which can also have negative effects... Hope Apple realises it, as the no-piracy environment was IMO important reasons for developers to create quality apps on iOS...
So, as a test, I used Catalyst to work around the bugs in using iOS AU's on the M1 Macs. This works fine on both the M1 and x86 Macs I've tested on. So, I updated one of my AU's to use Catalyst and then tested it and all is fine on iOS. I released the new version on iOS and enabled using it on the Mac. The Mac App Store ignores the Catalyst version and delivers the iOS version. It still crashes.
If anyone wants to be a test subject, I'll try to get a version of the app signed for independent distribution so that people can try it. I've never done Mac distribution with signed apps before though, so it could be a bit annoying before I get it to work smoothly. This should work on x86 Macs too if you want to beta it on a non-M1 Mac.
Happy to test on m1 MacBook using ableton flstudio and logic if it is of any help
Cool! I'll get it setup on my website and try to make sure that the signing is correct. I'll post the location here when I get it up. Thanks!
I've got a signed version of my PhaseDelayArray AUv3 compiled as a native Mac app using Catalyst. It's up on my website now for download at http://www.neonsilicon.com/Downloads/PDA.zip
This is very much a testing sort of thing. The reason I've done this is that running iOS AU's on the Apple Silicon Macs is still somewhat broken. So, I figured I'd give this a try. I'm not even really sure if this is something that is supposed to be supported by Apple. It does work though. The app is signed by me and notarized by Apple.
Please let me know if it works for you and any bugs you see. This does also run native on x86 Macs running Big Sur. So, you can use it there too. If this does turn out to be a viable path, I'll make the rest of my AU's available and link them off of my website.
Thanks for any feedback!
@NeonSilicon I'll try it, too. M1 MacBook Air.
@NeonSilicon The zip file only contained the user manual, not an installer.
The manual is the app. I put the app in my Applications directory in my home directory. You can put it inside the main /Applications folder too. Once it is there, your AU hosts like GarageBand and MainStage should see it as an AU that is available. Kinda weird, but it does seem to work this way. This is the way they actually work on iOS too.
@NeonSilicon Okay, it's working in Logic but Zenbeats wouldn't validate the plugin. I tried a few different things and couldn't make that happen. Very trippy effect!
Thanks for letting me know. I don't own Zenbeats, so I'm not sure how it works with AU's. I don't even know if PDA works with Zenbeats on iOS. I'll have to check into it.
@NeonSilicon I can't see any of your plugins in Zenbeats on an iPad, though all other AUv3s seem to work fine. No idea what that means.
That's weird, I wonder if I have a parameter set that Zenbeats doesn't like or if maybe this is related to an issue that's happening with installation of new AU's and some DAW's on the new OS releases.
Perhaps @Matthew@zenbeats could weigh in here. Matthew, please check the last several posts. Thanks.
Update: I rescanned the plugins in Zenbeats on the iPad and they’re all there now so I must have done something wrong yesterday. I’ll try again on the Mac later.