Using SwiftUI to Build a Mac-assed App in 2026

Summary

I recently launched the macOS version of Shopie, an app I first released on the iOS App Store late last year. Shopie helps you keep track of products you're interested in by letting you create wishlists and notifying you whenever a product's price, availability, and other details change. Unlike my other apps, where I typically blend AppKit (or UIKit) with SwiftUI, Shopie is built entirely in SwiftUI. I wanted to keep it that way to maximize code reuse across iOS, iPadOS, and now macOS. This post explores how far SwiftUI can take you on the Mac in 2026, especially if your goal is to build an app that feels truly native to the platform. It's not meant to be an exhaustive review of SwiftUI on macOS. It's simply a collection of recipes and issues I ran into while porting Shopie, a fairly small app, and keeping it 100% SwiftUI. If you want the TL;DR: we're not there yet. What's a Mac-assed app? The term "Mac-assed app" was coined by Collin Donnell and popularized by Brent Simmons and John Gruber. It describes apps that are not only native, but that also adopt the system's controls and conventions and integrate impeccably with the operating system's features. I consider Secrets to be a Mac-assed app, and proudly so. It uses native controls and looks beautiful while doing so. It leans heavily on the menu bar, includes plenty of keyboard shortcuts, supports multiple windows, has tooltips and hover states, and adopts system technologies such as Password AutoFill, AppleScript (to control other apps), Safari app extensions, and sudden termination. If you're a long-time Mac user, you can just feel it when an app ticks these boxes. But the popularity of Electron-based apps, and even the standard set by many first-party apps, may make this much harder for newer users to understand. SwiftUI shortcomings on macOS While porting Shopie to macOS, I ran into a spectrum of problems: from "this should be easier" to "this is simply not possible." Selected states On the Mac, selection has ...