Detecting Mac Catalyst in iOS apps
At WWDC 2019 Apple announced that it’ll now be possible to port iOS apps to the Mac via a technology called Catalyst and ever since I’ve had a goal to bring an existing app of mine to the Mac App Store just to see what the process would look like.
I’ve been working on making my Color and Gradient maker, analyzer and editor app called Neon work on the Mac and even though I use storyboards, I don’t use segues and so it is important that I know when the View Controller needs to be presented by pushing it onto the Navigation Stack, presented modally or needs to be presented in a new window and to do this I need a simple yet elegant solution to detect the device my app is being run on.
To accomplish this I built an extension for UIDevice. Please note that I’ve only accounted for iPhones, iPads, and Macs in this article. If you want to be able to detect other Operating Systems such as watchOS or tvOS drop me a comment down below.
Let’s get started by making an enum that will hold the different cases we’re dealing with
We’ll now make a #if condition to check if the OS is MacCatalyst and if not we’ll switch through the cases of UIDevice.current.userInterfaceIdiom to find out which iOS device our app is being run on.
In the gist above we are making a computed variable called deviceType that is of DeviceType (the enum we just made) and this will return the appropriate case of the device the app is currently being run on.
The main work is done and all that’s left is to execute and see how we can use it throughout our UIKit/SwiftUI Projects.
For this example we’ll print out the return case in viewDidLoad()
In your ViewController’s viewDidLoad() type this:
Since Device Type is an optional (because it might return nil from the default condition of the switch case) we’ll unwrap it using a guard let statement and returning from the function early incase the value contains null.
Once we know for sure that “type” will have some value we print it out into the console. The console will contain the case related to the device we’re executing the application on.
That’s been my way of very quickly detecting if my app is being executed on Mac Catalyst. If you liked it please leave a clap or 50 down below and if you have any alternative way of detecting Mac Catalyst please let me know on twitter @SwapnanilDhol. Thank you.
