system_profiler SPApplicationsDataType provides a list of Applications that spotlight knows about. This is also available form the System Report in About this Mac
One of the fields for each application is Kind
What exactly is this?
The values here are
- Apple Silicon, Intel, Universal which correspond to the CPU the application was compiled for.
- 32-bit (Unsupported) for executables in a Windows VM.
- Other for Eclipse and some other things, many but not all not fully compiled programs e.g. written in Java or Python (but again there are exceptions both ways)
- iOS - this includes apps from the iPhone/iPad store which are pure IOS (written before Catalyst) some apps that I assume are Catalyst - both of these make some sense but there are lao ones which are purely for macOS e.g. Emacs (the Mitsuharu port), VisualCode, dosbox-x, DrRacket.
The ones I want to know more about are iOS and Other. Now some of them are from the MacAppStore and are iPad/iPhone apps which makes sense.
However some are plain compiled C and are Apple Silicon only. What exactly makes system_profiler think they are iOS? (ie what has to be changed to make them recognised as Apple Silicon not iOS) Some were built by other people and their build system is not Xcode so I need to report the problem upstream.
Just for fun I have 3 versions of Emacs - which are all different Intel (which is understandable), Other and iOS.
