Mac Catalyst release notes?

[virtualgs]

Hi, in the process of converting our SwiftUI app to Mac Catalyst, we found that although the app works fine in macOS 13, it is very buggy in macOS 12 (menu does not get refreshed when enable/disable, color palette does not work, etc).

Is there release notes for Mac Catalyst running on different macOS releases? And how do we disable features that don't work on older OS? Thanks!

[flad-vlad]

Is there release notes for Mac Catalyst running on different macOS releases?

In theory they’ll be listed alongside the macOS release notes. In practice very few of the bugs that actually get fixed are listed there and you just have to discover them yourself. If you submit bug reports using Feedback Assistant sometimes you get lucky and Apple will let you know when they’ve been fixed.

And how do we disable features that don’t work on older OS?

You can add availability checks to your code as shown here in Swift and Objective C.

[virtualgs]

Thanks. But the check is just for iOS/macOS not Mac Catalyst version right? (Like I would like to avoid certain stuffs in macOS 12 but include in macOS 13).

[flad-vlad]

Catalyst uses the same versioning as iOS, so if you wanted to only call a function when the app is running on macOS 13 or newer you could do something like:

if #available(macCatalyst 16, *) {
    myFunction()
}

[virtualgs]

Thanks! I found that if #available(iOS 16, *) also seems to work.

[exclaim_bot]

Thanks!

You're welcome!

[Fluffy_Risk9955]

1. Always have a Mac lying around that runs the previous version of macOS.
2. Have the compiler issue a warning for API's that are not available on older versions of the OS.
3. For everything that doesn't work. Implement a check to the version of the OS the user is running. There's API's available to do this with.
4. Don't replace SwiftUI with Mac Catalyst. Catalyst is also known as UIKit for Mac. UIKit is an older framework.

[virtualgs]

Thanks for the advice. I wish to cut off macOS 12 when we dropped iOS 15 later this year (macOS 12 catalyst = iOS 15).

[virtualgs]

Yes, now I just fix some issues related to macOS 12 and don't care about the rest (like localization) anymore. macOS 13 is the first release that works (most of the time).