Is it possible to publish Mac Catalyst app as seperate, macOS only version?

Question

When enabling macOS support in my iOS project it runs fine on my Mac. However, I am not sure how this version will be published.

Is it possible to maintain different targets which can be submitted as different apps? One target to the iOS App Store (without macOS support) and one target to the macOS App Store (without iOS support)?

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Details:

An iPhone + iPad version of my app has been in the iOS App Store (bundle ID my.company.MyApp ) for many years. So has a native macOS version in the Mac App Store (bundle ID my.company.MyAppMac ).

Although the iOS and macOS versions doe share a lot of code, it has always quite a lot of work to maintain these two version. Working on a shared project where "only" the UI has to adopted to work well on macOS would be great.

However, I would like to use the Catalyst version to replace the existing, native macOS app. Not as universal new iOS+macOS App. Is this possible?

Answer 1

I'm doing this with a few of my apps.

However, with the most recent one, Apple wouldn't let me give the Mac app and the iOS app the same name. I'm not sure if that was their way of trying to force me to release a universal app, or if it was a temporary App Store Connect issue. The apps I previously released with matching names are still available and I haven't released a new app since then.