With people’s love for on-demand entertainment, it’s no surprise that the Netflix app is one of the most downloaded across the various platforms it is available on. Do you know which platform it isn’t available on? macOS. And based on a new report from Bloomberg, that doesn’t look likely to change anytime soon.
This announcement comes as a blow for Apple’s Catalyst initiative which is trying to get as many apps ported from iOS to macOS as possible and make them available on their Catalina store (which is already live. And while you could argue that Netflix is already available on all Mac devices through a web browser the ability to download movies or integrate with Apple’s picture-in-picture mode would be once for many people and features they can’t use via a web browser.
Perhaps what makes Netflix’s approach to this whole thing is that they have developed a Windows 10 App, which they have supported for several years now, but it appears they don’t feel it’s worth the effort to add another application that needs to be maintained and are happy for Mac users to just continue streaming content via their browsers. Or perhaps they believe that most Apple aficionados likely already have an iPad and so probably wouldn’t need this sort of thing.
Netflix doesn’t provide any clear reason for their decision, but if you are a macOS user who was hoping for some Netflix love, it appears you might need to look elsewhere if you intend to download your Netflix content and view while on the move.
Last Updated: October 9, 2019
HvR
October 9, 2019 at 21:14
“Netflix doesn’t provide any clear reason for their decision” thought the reason was well known.
They do not want to give 30% of their income to Apple; with Android they can side step it but Apple would not allow them to do it. With current competitive market in the streaming service it would be a straight up loss.