niochat/nio

Support macOS through Catalyst

justMaku opened this issue ยท 3 comments

Nio feels and looks much better than default Electron based clients and I would love to use it on my desktop computer too. I'm unsure whether Catalyst is the right way of supporting macOS, maybe a native SwiftUI implementation would be better, but either way, I think this is a feature Nio team should look into.

This is definitely on the roadmap, thanks for the dedicated issue! @pixlwave has made already made some interesting experiments in this regard, including a Catalyst build and running Nio iOS directly on an M1 Mac.

There were some issues in the Matrix SDK iirc making this unnecessarily complicated at the time. @pixlwave do you remember what exactly was going on there?

In any case, a desktop version of Nio is definitely going to happen. I very much want this to exist as well ๐Ÿ˜„

The issue at the time was compiling Realm supplied by Cocoapods for Catalyst, but this appears to be fixed as niochat/MatrixSDK already includes a Catalyst build. The swiftpm branch compiles fine under Catalyst however an Xcode bug is preventing this from just working - it can be made to work, but so far I've only managed to run the product from Finder and not actually debug it with Xcode.

Re a native macOS version, I'm hoping #983 will get merged and then the SDK will be sitting waiting to be used ๐Ÿคž

Quick status update, matrix-org/matrix-ios-sdk#983 has been merged ๐ŸŽ‰. So that should open the way to a proper macOS build once the next version is released.