Running apps compiled for newer OS X versions on older versions (rant)
Running apps compiled for newer OS X versions on older versions (rant)
- Subject: Running apps compiled for newer OS X versions on older versions (rant)
- From: Andreas Falkenhahn <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 22 Aug 2016 13:15:02 +0200
I have two OS X systems: One running 10.6 and another one always running
the latest version. I typically use the one running 10.6 for building my
app and the latest one to see if everything is still working correctly.
Out of curiosity, I've just run a little test and compiled my app on the
10.11 system for the 10.11 target and tried to run it on the 10.6 system,
just to see what happens. All I got is a message "Illegal instruction"
printed to stdout, or, when starting the app through Finder, a message
dialog telling me that the app has crashed and needs to be shut down.
Optionally, it offered me to send a crash report to Apple.
That was quite a surprise to me. I mean, this is the 21st century, I think
one could at least expect a message dialog telling the user that this app
needs at least Mac OS 10.11 or something, but no, it just crashed, leaving
the user quite clueless as to why it did so.
After the initial shock I thought: Ok, maybe it's up to my app to make
sure that the user is running the required OS X version and have my
app show a message box in case he doesn't? So I added some debug output
to my main() to see if it was invoked at all. But guess what: It wasn't.
Hence, there's nothing I can do about this at all because the crash seems
to happen already in the compiler startup code that is executed before
my main().
I don't think this is very user-friendly. It will leave users of older
OS X versions really puzzled because apps simply crash on older versions.
It would be much nicer if there was a message box or something informing
the user that this app needs a newer OS X version, because, well, it is
the 21st century and just crashing really isn't nice...
$0.02
--
Best regards,
Andreas Falkenhahn mailto:email@hidden
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