It looks as though the days of buying the same app multiple times for your macOS and iOS devices may soon be over.

As The Verge reports, game and app developer Steve Troughton-Smith noticed one of the new features in the 11.4 beta version of Apple Xcode is universal purchases. What it means is, a developer can decide to build and distribute an app as a universal purchase, which means anyone purchasing such an app can use it on both their macOS and iOS devices, as well as those running iPadOS, tvOS, and watchOS if there's support.

Universal Purchase for Mac/iOS apps! ?? pic.twitter.com/9yNrDmwvWD

— Steve Troughton-Smith (@stroughtonsmith) February 5, 2020

By offering apps as universal purchases, consumers are getting a better deal on the apps they buy and it forms a new feature developers can advertise as well as being able to more easily develop and distribute apps across all of Apple's platforms. Apple clearly wants this to become the norm as universal purchase will be enabled by default for new Mac Catalyst apps created with Xcode 11.4.

Of course, some developers will want to continue distributing and charging for their apps per platform, which is still supported. However, as universal purchase becomes more common I won't be surprised if end users start complaining about apps that don't support it.

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