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How to Install iOS Apps on Apple Silicon Macs

13th June 2021

Jacob Woolcock

1:51

Macs with Apple Silicone inside can do something that other Macs simply can’t – they can run native iPad and iPhone apps right from the dock! Once installed, these apps work just like normal macOS apps. In this quick tutorial video you’ll learn how to find and install both iPhone and iPad apps on your iMac, MacBook Pro, Mac Mini or MacBook Air with M1 Apple Silicone.

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With the new M1 Mac, you can now run iPad and iPhone apps on your Mac. Here’s how it works. To find an app to run on your Mac, which perhaps is normally for iPhone or iPad, jump straight into the App Store on your computer. From here, you’re going to search for whatever app you want to find. There’s a podcast player that I like called Overcast, and there isn’t a Mac version of that app available, but I can grab the iPad version. If I search for podcasts, however, I’ll only get the apps that are made for the Mac on that first search page. However, at the top of the App Store, I can now tap onto the iPhone and iPad App section, and that will show the apps which aren’t made for the Mac, which are made for your iOS devices. And here, I can find my podcast player of choice, Overcast. When I click on the Overcast page, I then get the App Store listing just like you would do on the iPad normally, and you can even browse the screenshots for the iPad or iPhone versions. Then, just like you would on a normal Mac App Store App, you download the app. The great thing now is that the app will work just like any other app on your computer. It’ll be in the Applications Folder, or if I press the Applications button in the Dock, it will be there as well. I can drag it onto my own Dock wherever I like, and I can open it and use it just like any other app. This particular app will even synchronise my podcast playlists between my iPhone and my iMac, which is great. I can resize that app, I can move it around and interact with it just like I would do normally. Now, the only catch with running iOS apps on an M1 Mac is that the developer has to allow this to happen for their particular apps – that may mean that some of the apps that you want to find aren’t there at the moment. Maybe this will change in the future, but for now, there’s a good selection of apps that you can run on your Mac that you just simply couldn’t run before, and that’s got to be a win.

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