From here.

What’s Apt? It’s a new package manager(released with Ubuntu 16.04, not new for now but still new for me) for Ubuntu that is poised to take over for “Apt-get.” It’s built to be more efficient, more secure, and more user friendly.

Apt was introduced in 16.04 to simplify the package manager and to merge multiple commands into one single command. The functions from “apt-get” have been taken and have been created to function in similar ways in Apt.

Basically you can use the “apt” commands as the previous “apt-*“ commands by just replacing “apt-get/apt-cache” with “apt” in the command line. Here is some examples:

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apt search python
apt policy python
sudo apt update
sudo apt dist-upgrade

Despite the fact that these new Apt commands are created to function similar to the old Apt-get commands, these new commands are NOT calling the old ones. They’re completely new – fresh commands to interact with packages. For some commands like “apt search” the output text are in different format.