What is a Catalyst?

Jun 5, 2019

On Monday during WWDC, Craig Federighi introduced the long awaited and much rumored technology to bring iOS apps to the Mac. While everyone had been calling it Marzipan for months, the actual code name turned out to be Catalyst. That name resonated in me: what is a Catalyst?

From a chemical point of view, a catalyst is a compound that takes part on a chemical reaction, without being consumed, and eases the transformation from reagents to products. There is something else, though, that makes calling this technology Catalyst so intriguing.

In a chemical reaction, for reactants to become products they need to overcome an energy barrier: the activation energy. In a reaction, thus, reactants begin from their energy level, require some input from the outside to temporarily increase their energy, and then yield some products that generally have a lower energy than the one the reactants began from.
What a catalyst does is to lower that energy barrier so that reactants can more easily become products.

This is where the name is so aptly given: Catalyst (the technology) acts as a catalyst (the chemical) not by erasing the energy barrier altogether, but by lowering it so that developers can focus on what else there is to be customized. It decreases the required energy and eases a transition that would have been possible, but would have required much more energy from a developer point of view.

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