
Apple's list of 235 apps that are incompatible with macOS Catalina - bookofjoe
https://thetapedrive.com/235-apps-incompatible-with-catalina
======
cousin_it
Funny thing about games: most revenue happens soon after release. It's like
movies. A game from several years ago usually has low ongoing revenue, so
there's little profit in updating it for a new OS. Many Mac games will just
die. Especially indies, where the creator might have already moved on. Do you
own any nice but not very successful Mac games? They'll die. This move
destroys the reputation of Mac as a game platform, compared to Windows which
can run decades old games fine.

I'm so happy now that Steam purchases aren't tied to platform and that most
gamedevs don't target Mac exclusively. I can just move to PC and keep the
games I own. Probably lots of people will do the same.

~~~
MereInterest
This is also why all programs should be distributed with source code. If not,
you are at the mercy of the platform not to break what you have bought.

~~~
xhruso00
Having app that heavily relies on 32-bit Carbon Api open sourced is useless.
You can't replace those Api call with newer because they simply don't exist or
have no alternative. It's not going to help much

~~~
shakna
Having access to the source makes it much easier for the community to do what
they already do - create an open source re-implementation of the engine.

------
etaioinshrdlu
That this is even remotely acceptable is a sign of how unidealistic the
industry has become, compared to Java of 20 years ago which promised write
once, run anywhere.

If you did however stick to pure Java 20 years ago, your app probably runs
fine now. That is the way things should be. This compatibility breaking from
Apple is just a slap in the face.

------
chimi
This is why Microsoft is the better long-term play: Backwards compatibility --
their commitment to the investment of labor. If you build your software on
Apple, there almost certainly will come a point in the future where your code
will cease to work.

Microsoft has made a commitment to backward compatibility. It's such a huge
benefit. I have code that has continued to run, untouched, for _decades_. I
don't have to upgrade my development environment. I don't have to buy a new
laptop to run the latest xcode. I never have to worry that my years of
investment into my own software platform will be worthless three years from
now or require unknown amounts of recoding to work.

This is not true of Apple, Ruby, or almost any open source project.

I want to continue moving forward all the time. I loathe the requirement to go
back and redo what I'd already done and works. It wastes my time, my money,
and my confidence in my vendor.

~~~
scarface74
And how much has it cost Microsoft? Apple was able to successfully take the
base of MacOS and port it’s operating system to a much lower spec phone back
in 2007 and came to dominate the smart phone market (in profit they only thing
that matters), the tablet market where MS failed repeatedly, not to mention it
was able to port the base OS to everything from Watches and TV set top boxes -
all things that Microsoft tried and failed at.

MS being so concerned with backwards compatibility has slowed down its ability
to move fast into new markets even compared to Google.

If you are “building your software” for desktop PCs (or Macs) , you’re
building on top of market that is becoming less important every year. There is
no energy or investments going into desktop computers besides games and even
that market is small. The only companies making real money in computer
software are Microsoft and Adobe and even they are pivoting more toward
browser based software and mobile.

Do you think that Apple should still bundle a PPC emulator with modern Macs? A
68K emulator?

Not being willing to drop legacy code comes with its own costs in maintenance
and increases the vulnerability surface. Just the fact that there are over a
half dozen ways to represent a string in Windows has led to security
vulnerabilities, not to mention all of the other legacy cruft.

~~~
afroboy
Unless you have shares in Apple your whole point is invalid, you're looking to
this from Apple point of view which is very good for her business but not
mine, i care about the company that give me the best solutions to my problems
not the company that's can milk me the last day of my life.

~~~
scarface74
Not having to worry about yet another security vulnerability caused by 10 year
old code does impact me. It’s also nice to have other Apple products that MS
could never produce because they worshipped at the alter of backwards
compatibility.

Running outdated code on a bloated operating system doesn’t benefit me.

~~~
turndown
>Not having to worry about yet another security vulnerability caused by 10
year old code does impact me.

Surely you're not suggesting that OS X is somehow more secure because it
doesn't provide as much backwards compatability?

>It’s also nice to have other Apple products that MS could never produce
because they worshipped at the alter of backwards compatibility.

It is looking more and more like Apple cannot produce products other people
can, not the other way around. Most of their recent product announcements(2017
and after, especially) have begun to look quite disappointing in my eyes.

~~~
scarface74
By definition, the less code you have to maintain the less surface area for
vulnerabilities.

 _It is looking more and more like Apple cannot produce products other people
can, not the other way around. Most of their recent product announcements(2017
and after, especially) have begun to look quite disappointing in my eyes._

If that were true, you would see Apple’s products trending downward when other
competitors are trending upwards.....

~~~
turndown
>By definition, the less code you have to maintain the less surface area for
vulnerabilities.

It does not sound like you have any legitimate information about how Windows
compatability increases vulnerabilites beyond vague statements. Trust me when
I say that no one here thinks Windows is terribly secure, just that Mac OS X
isn't secure at all either, and doesn't provide backwards compatability on
top.

>If that were true, you would see Apple’s products trending downward when
other competitors are trending upwards.....

Is this not the case? Lowered product buys have been offset by higher prices,
but the craze of Apple products of the early to mid 2010s is over; I have also
only heard negative things about their recent products too. The failed
keyboard on Macbooks, how buggy the recent OS release has been, both of my
roommates who have iPhone Xs are thinking about switching to Android after
being plagued with constant hardware and software issues. Of course, it is
possible I live in a bubble, but most people I know who have Apple technology
complain a lot more about their tech than I do.

~~~
scarface74
Samsung and every other vendor outside of China have announced lower sales as
people keep their phones longer.

While everyone admits that Mac keyboards are horrible, Mac sales are so small
compared to everything else Apple sells, it doesn’t really hurt their bottom
line

 _both of my roommates who have iPhone Xs are thinking about switching to
Android after being plagued with constant hardware and software issues._

Anecdote is not data.

 _It does not sound like you have any legitimate information about how Windows
compatability increases vulnerabilites beyond vague statements._

Let me tell you a little story about how the half dozen different ways to
represent and encode a string in Windows led to a security issue in IIS where
you could just encode a DOS command in a browser window and have it execute
remotely....

[https://www.sans.org/reading-
room/whitepapers/threats/paper/...](https://www.sans.org/reading-
room/whitepapers/threats/paper/458)

Or a DCOM vulnerability in 2019. No one uses DCOM anymore.

[https://www.cvedetails.com/cve/CVE-2003-0352/](https://www.cvedetails.com/cve/CVE-2003-0352/)

~~~
icebraining
As it says right on the URL, that CVE is from 2003, not 2019, and it doesn't
affect any Windows version past XP.

~~~
scarface74
Yes and by then you already had the 7 plus versions of defining a string
dating back to Windows 3 (1992). Backwards compatibility was already a problem
then. Since then, MS has had 15 more years worth of cruft on top of that s d
yet more ways to define a string. If backwards compatibility caused a security
vulnerability back then, how much old Windows 95 code do you think is causing
issues now?

------
pkamb
QuickTime 7 is the biggest loss. Really wish that would somehow be
updated/supported as a 64-bit app, as QuickTime X does _not_ replace it.

~~~
wilg
We made an app to try to fill that gap! Check it out if you like:
[https://videovillage.co/screen/](https://videovillage.co/screen/)

~~~
pkamb
Is there a trial? I'd like to test it but $99 to even download the app is a
hard ask.

------
bluedino
The very last one on the list, TextWrangler, is simply a 32-bit app. No big
deal. They have offered BBEdit (the big brother to it) as a replacement.

[https://www.barebones.com/products/bbedit/faqs.html#continue](https://www.barebones.com/products/bbedit/faqs.html#continue)

------
Aloha
I can understand eliminating CarbonLib support, though I would have made
CarbonLib an optional component you needed to install on the OS a couple years
ago to make it clear this was now an optional component that may no longer be
supported in the near future.

I also don't get why they would eliminate all 32-bit userspace support though
- like why eliminate support for 32-bit Cocoa apps, and I think Apple made a
mistake here by eliminating support.

~~~
twoodfin
My guess: The binary translation support they’re going to build into ARM Macs
will exclusively support x64, including low-cost bridging between x64
application code and ARM64 library code.

Not to mention Apple never leaves deprecated runtimes around for more than a
few years. Once 64-bit Carbon was canned the writing was on the wall.

~~~
Aloha
Thats a fair idea, I believe x86-64 is less complex with fewer addressing
modes than x86 is. So that makes sense.

I'm still not sure about how I feel about an ARM laptop, I'm not opposed
though.

~~~
notmainacct
Arm architecture is rock-solid. The trick is making an ARM processor fast
enough for desktop or laptop use. ARM has unfortunately been relegated to low-
end devices even though the architecture could do well for high-end machines.
We don't have a good interop for running x_86 or x_64 code on ARM so the
compatibility isn't there for most users (like Windows 8 ARM). Linux is mostly
fine on ARM if you can compile from source and you have a compiler for that
given language that works for ARM.

------
docdeek
Perhaps these apps were already well beyond supported? I don't use anything
except 1Password on the list at the link and the current supported version is
7. Version 2.x would have been sometime and many security updates ago, non?

~~~
wetpaws
On Windows it is perfectly reasonable to expect aps running even if they are
20 or sometimes 30 years old.

~~~
scarface74
64 bit Windows doesn’t run 16 bit Windows code.

~~~
wetpaws
[https://youtu.be/8WP7AkJo3OE](https://youtu.be/8WP7AkJo3OE)

Yes and no. You can run progman and file manager on modern windows. Hell, you
can run DOS aps.

~~~
Dylan16807
That's the 32 bit version. Without 64 bit support I wouldn't call it 'modern
windows'. There's a reason almost nobody uses it.

------
beardedman
If this were 20 years ago, people would be griping about some MS issue about
providing less than adequate service, etc.

Apple has always been anal about their app store & apps. As a developer - it's
a pain. As an end-user I appreciate it.

~~~
on_and_off
As an end user, I don't really appreciate that some of the apps I am using are
just going to stop working.

~~~
nettdata
Then don’t upgrade.

~~~
damnyou
What happens when your laptop goes bust and you need to get a new one?

------
gruturo
I'm quite surprised Apple isn't providing a VM wrapper to run these apps in a
more or less seamless way, for at least the next 2-3 versions. This is leaving
a lot of software, and a lot of people, without alternatives.

~~~
scarface74
It’s been _10 years_ since Apple released a 64 bit OS and the last 32 bit x86
based Mac.

~~~
gruturo
Yeah that looks like a lot of time, except we're looking at some hard evidence
saying it wasn't, after all.

Apple helped push forward the state of the art on many things by dropping
legacies (No floppy. No CD. No more serial, parallel, scsi, PS/2 ports), but
on some it just hurt its own customers with excessive eagerness (USB-C and
dongle hell. Headphone jacks, where the ideal timing would have been NEVER.
And this very thread about 32bit support).

MacOS is not iOS. There aren't just signed apps coming from a store. They
failed to account for that. And this is coming from the company which managed
to make the 68K->PPC transition, and the PPC->x86 ones, mostly painless for
its users. This is so disappointing, knowing what they're capable of.

~~~
scarface74
What do you mean they failed to account for that? They have a mechanism for
signed apps outside of the store that doesn’t cost the developers anything and
even that can be bypassed by a simple control click.

But for reference.

PPC Macs were introduced in 1994 and 68K emulation was dropped in 2006 with
the introduction of x86 based Macs.

OS X was introduced in 2001 and OS 9 support was dropped in 2006.

PPC support was dropped in 2006 (?)

Most of the apps on the list have newer supported versions.

~~~
gruturo
By "Failed to account for that" I mean that they failed to consider how much
software has been produced outside their control, so they should have been
more considerate with the timeline for dropping compatibility. And there's
plenty, plenty more stuff outside these 235 apps - sometimes new versions are
expensive and do nothing new or useful for most users.

Here we are talking about dropping application that the CPU is still fully
capable of running. There's no silicon advantage like on the latest iPhones.
There's no big performance penalty running an emulated app, which would
quickly drive people to use something native. There's no Moore's law
obsoleting your current platform nearly as quickly as it once happened.

Apple has, in the past, treated people _better_ when changing architecture
that it just did with this thing, where the architecture stayed the same.

Edit: To the long list of past architectures Apple has dropped, maybe the root
of the problem would be that I (mistakenly, maybe) do not consider 32-bit as
past. I consider it still somewhat current, so seeing it dropped like this is
less acceptable.

~~~
plorkyeran
Apple sold 32-bit x86 Macs for less than a year, and they sold approximately
zero of them during that year. It was a legacy platform that no one should
have been targeting for nearly the entire history of macOS on x86.

------
wincent
Deep link to more readable form of the full list:
[https://gist.github.com/stevemoser/a4388df17633beae5bc3fb07d...](https://gist.github.com/stevemoser/a4388df17633beae5bc3fb07d38373e2#gistcomment-3050413)

------
pacetherace
Our IT has told us to not upgrade macOS because the wireless keyboard/mouse
combo most of us use stops working.

------
Eric_WVGG
There’s gonna be a whole lot of unhappy Quickbooks users out there. There’s
something special about accounting software that makes people reluctant to
upgrade, and Intuit certainly hasn’t helped by making the process difficult,
confusing and expensive.

~~~
techslave
quick books becomes crippleware every 3 years. your perpetual license, isn’t.

this is just a current list. QB will have an update. paid update.

------
jonplackett
I love TextWrangler. I may not upgrade just because of this. It still seems to
handle massive files better than anything else I’ve used. Even BBEdit which is
supposed to be it’s successor.

How can this be?

~~~
kalleboo
TextWrangler was always just a fork of BBEdit (it replaced “BBEdit Lite” as
the free version) so there should be no real difference in performance.

BBEdit 12 also improved large file support so maybe give it another try if you
haven’t recently?

~~~
jonplackett
Thanks, will do. I really didn’t understand it either but it was definitely
the case!

------
mjcohen
I like good old Picasa for handling my photos. It works on High Sierra and,
clicking OK a few times when it starts up, on Mojave. I know there are lots of
other photo handlers, but Picasa is my choice. So, no Catalina for me.

Also, I use Office 2011 under High Sierra, so another reason.

~~~
dehrmann
Some pretty ancient versions of Office run on Windows 10, and I don't think
it's because they're both MS; I think it's because MS makes fewer breaking
changes between OS versions and maintains a lot of backwards compatibility for
all apps.

------
rarepostinlurkr
This is not new, same data is on disk for 10.14 and 10.13. Completely wrong
conclusions

------
robbrown451
Odd that it is so hard to get to the actual list that you can read and search.

------
crb002
Isn't there a way to use Ghidra and cross compile it to 64 bit?

------
kalyori
Dang that's a lot of apps that are losing support.

------
_Codemonkeyism
And most important: TF2

------
pointerpointer
The scheme behind the lack of downwards compatibility was always a pain with
OSX. It's great for the app developers because they can offer you a paid
upgrade to a new compatible version. But UX wise it's so bad it makes you
consider moving to another OS.

I once had ProTools on a MacPro and found it out the hard way. I thought I
could just upgrade to the next OSX version like with almost any other OS. But
after the upgrade many apps including ProTools didn't work anymore and could
only get up an running again after paying thousands of euro's to upgrade not
only ProTools, also all it's plugins and a lot of other unrelated apps as
well. That was my last MacPro, and I never bought and never will buy any OSX
app again.

~~~
thomascgalvin
Killing 32 bit support is going to cost me about $600 per year, because I
still have a pre-CC copy of Photoshop, In Design, and so on. I am absolutely
furious at Apple for this.

~~~
pembrook
This comment is a perfect illustration of the bizarre irrationality people
have when discussing Apple.

You’re stuck on a 6+ year old piece of software because Adobe moved to a
higher priced cloud-based model...maybe you should be mad at Adobe...6 years
ago...not Apple?

~~~
KenanSulayman
Why though? He literally chose to stick with the old software, protesting with
his money. Seriously though, what's the problem with expecting 32bit software
to keep working?

~~~
pembrook
The same problem with expecting 8-bit software to keep working.

All organizations have limited resources. Each hour spent supporting 32 bit is
an hour that could’ve been spent on more important things.

~~~
ohiovr
8 bit software still works.

~~~
scarface74
So which platform supports 8 bit software?

~~~
ohiovr
Emulators support nearly everything. I can even run a TI994a program on a PC,
Mac, or Linux. If you can't run emulators on Mac that is sad news to me. Maybe
bad example, it was technically 16 bit, but it was well over 30 years old.
Here is a pet emulator:
[https://www.masswerk.at/pet/](https://www.masswerk.at/pet/)

Just the other day my brother told me he met a really talented graphics
designer that still primarily uses some 25 year old sign design software.
Never heard of it before, and don't remember the name.

We balk at having to pay monthly for software we bought over 10 years ago and
even today we'd not miss any new features offered. Great artists (I'm not one
of them) can produce great visuals. Limitation can be better for creativity
than no restrictions for some anyway.

~~~
scarface74
Of course you can run emulators. But that has nothing to do with OS vendors
maintaining backwards compatibility.

Are you really arguing that Windows is compatibility with the Super Nintendo
because you can run an emulator?

~~~
ohiovr
Yes, and this is how powerpc applications were supported for years.

------
pmiller2
Probably a good 1/4 of these apps are either obsolete, or no one should really
be running them, anyway. The only thing that stuck out to me was 1Password.

~~~
ken
It's 1Password 2.12.2, which is almost 10 years old.

------
behnamoh
Apple might think it can get away with removing the 3.5mm audio jack or
restricting iOS users to only _one_ app store or not allowing flash content on
iOS Safari etc., but they sure as hell can't get away with such ridiculous
changes when it comes to macOS pro users. What is Apple thinking, really? They
might be able to start a global change in the mobile industry because they own
a huge market share there, but when it comes to computers, they're not in a
position to dictate to developers what they can run on their machines and what
they can't. The more it goes, the more of a toy MBP becomes, both hardware-
and software-wise. I'm seriously considering switching back to Windows, which
is sad.

~~~
threeseed
2019 and you're still bringing up Flash ?

And if you do own a Mac which I highly doubt you would know that nothing
really has changed. I can still run the apps I want. I can still use Homebrew
to install CLI tools and libraries. I still don't need to use the App Store.

The only difference is that they finally got rid of 32-bit support which was a
decision years in the making.

~~~
behnamoh
I don't have to prove to you that I own a Mac. Plus, bringing up flash was to
further explain my point, which is, Apple getting rid of certain technologies
in the computer sector as if they are the leader of the market which they are
not. They already are struggling to keep their current users, and a move like
this (getting rid of 32-bit apps) further decreases their market share.

~~~
deergomoo
> Plus, bringing up flash was to further explain my point, which is, Apple
> getting rid of certain technologies in the computer sector as if they are
> the leader of the market which they are not

I'm not sure the Flash argument really supports that point honestly. Leader of
the market or not, Apple's refusal to support Flash on iOS was a major
contributor to Flash's slide into irrelevance.

Although it would have probably happened anyway considering that Flash for
Android was briefly a thing, and very much did prove the hypothesis that Flash
on low powered mobile devices was a terrible idea.

~~~
Terretta
If they get rid of tech, and they're not the leader in the market, well, it's
their minority market share, their minority revenue, and as a non-monopoly,
they have every right.

~~~
behnamoh
No one said they don't have the right to do that. The discussion here is how
that affects people who are using their devices and how much unnecessary
problems they are now facing.

~~~
Terretta
None at all if you keep using what worked when you got the devices and apps.
If it’s not obsolete (the general argument here), don’t replace the OS under
it.

------
umvi
I would guess these apps are insecure in some way.

I've been a loyal Apple user for 20 years, and in my experience every decision
Apple makes is based on extremely logical and intelligent reasons though they
don't always publish said reasons.

But I would suspect macOS is the most advanced OS ever designed _because_ of
the little things like this that put it a cut above the trainwreck that is
Windows 10 or Linux. You gotta cut out the cancer before it ruins your
platform.

~~~
LeoPanthera
It's got nothing to do with security. These (versions of) apps do not include
64-bit builds, which is required for Catalina support.

~~~
umvi
Well, like I said, cutting out the cruft. 32-bit is obsolete - it's 2019 for
heaven's sake. Maybe these companies will put forth more of an effort to keep
their software up to snuff.

~~~
13415
Unlikely. Speaking for myself, I have decided to drop support for MacOS
starting with Catalina. I might still provide an experimental built, but it's
just too much of a pain in the ass to support the platform long-term. I've
been doing this for 20 years and almost every OS upgrade there is some kind of
trouble or unnecessary things to do. I'm not in it for the money anyway, but
to be honest, I really doubt that MacOS support is worth it for most small
companies.

~~~
droithomme
We've supported some products that have been on the MacOS platform since the
late 1980s. Catalina compatibility is not going to happen and there will be no
further development. It's been too much time treading water and hasn't been
profitable for sometime even though we are the preeminent application in our
domain and none of our competitors are replacements. Customers have been, are,
and will be following us to the Windows version.

Good software takes 10 years. Great software takes 20 years.

If you have to spend all your time rewriting though just to stay in place it
never gets great. Instead you just introduce instabilities and
incompatibilities for no good reason other than fashion and hardware sales for
a competitor.

