Apple’s News, Stocks, Home, and Voice Memos apps will be getting improved with macOS Catalina

Back at the Worldwide Developers Conference last year, Apple launched its first four apps originally designed for iOS onto macOS Mojave. Those were News, Home, Stocks, and Voice Memos. And now Apple says those apps will be seeing a big improvement with macOS Catalina.

CNET is reporting on Wednesday that Apple plans on improving its four first iPad apps ported over to macOS, saying that there’s room to improve and the company plans on taking advantage of that. Craig Federighi, Apple’s SVP of Software Engineering, says that those initial apps will be getting improvements with the upcoming macOS Catalina release:

They’re getting improvements,” Federighi said. “The underlying technology has matured…Some of that is super low-level stuff. Some people have dissected those apps and realized that they were sort of two halves: an AppKit half and a UIKit half, literally running in different processes. That’s all unified now. This has become much more of a native Mac framework…So automatically, the apps we built last year are upgraded.

Some of the complaints regarding the apps was the general aesthetic, along with the fact that none of them took advantage of the extra capabilities made possible by the Mac’s operating system. So Apple wants to make improvements to turn things around, and show that these first four apps were just the beginning, and Apple will continue to improve upon the design and implementation moving forward.

We’ve looked at the design and features of some of those apps and said we can make this a bit more of a Mac experience through changes that are independent of the use of Catalyst, but are just design team decisions,” Federighi said. “When I read some of the initial reviews of those apps, people were saying, ‘Obviously this technology is causing them to do things that don’t feel Mac-like.’ Honestly, 90% of those were just decisions that designers made … People took that as ‘this feels iOS-y’ and therefore they thought it was a technology thing. Actually, it was a designer preference. So part of [the upgrade] is we said we’ve got to co-evolve with our user base around the aesthetics of the Mac experience. And so we made some adjustments to the apps.

Finally, the tune-up. Apple says that while there are two developer betas of macOS Catalina, these planned changes for Stocks, News, Voice Memos, and Home aren’t available just yet. They will come to light with the first public beta of macOS Catalina when that becomes available soon.

If you’ve used these apps in the past, are you looking forward to any changes coming to them down the road? How are you hoping Apple makes these changes?