Don’t stop macOS support

[duncanwilcox]

Problem Statement

macOS is not iOS. We support customers all the way back to 10.14.4, why would the v9 SDK require macOS 12?

Solution Brainstorm

No response

Are you willing to submit a PR?

No response

[linear]

COCOA-946

[philprime]

Hi @duncanwilcox, thank you for raising this concern.

You can find our reasoning for the chosen platform version support here in our decisions log.

Requiring macOS 12 even extends our strategy of major-4 backwards compatiblity by an additional major version (macOS 26, macOS 15, macOS 14, macOS 13, macOS 12). Supporting macOS 10.14 would require us to keep supporting 8 major versions. Even Apple dropped support for macOS 10.14 over 4 years ago in 2021 (https://endoflife.date/macos).

Furthermore, supporting very old versions of macOS limits us in developing with newer language features available on newer OS versions and SDK compiler and runtime optimizations, resulting in smaller framework sizes (therefore less impact on apps using the SDK).

This is one of the main reasons why we are publishing a new major version, as you can still use v8 for older systems, but we want to enable SDK users on newer platforms to benefit from changes in the eco system too.

Do you have further concerns/reasons for us to keep supporting older systems?

[duncanwilcox]

That Apple dropped support isn't stopping users from using the system, due to a number of different reasons, generally because of specific software, drivers or hardware that can't be used on more recent macOS versions.

For that reason we are not giving up support for 10.14.4, and yes it requires a bit more development work and a bit more testing. As a customer of Sentry I can only express my needs, which reflect my customer needs.

Also, while Apple no longer provides security patches for macOS, they still support targeting 10.13 in Xcode 26. In fact we do still hear from customers who would want 10.12 support.

At the very least I hope to be able to use the v8 SDK for the foreseeable future, if you don't have a better solution. I think it should be possible to add new features (that only work on newer macOS) without dropping how the rest of the SDK works on older macOS. What I fear is that at some point your backend service will no longer accept SDK v8 calls, leaving us with no choice but to give up Sentry.

Feels like subpar treatment just because we want to support all of our users.

[philprime]

Thank you for the additional insights and concerns. We'll discuss this internally and get back to you soon.

[philprime]

Thanks @duncanwilcox for your patience.

We had an internal discussion and decided that we will keep the minimum available version at macOS 10.14

That being said, our data has shown that the usage coming from this platform is very low and due to limited available resource we can not give it high priority support.

With regards to this concern:

At the very least I hope to be able to use the v8 SDK for the foreseeable future, if you don't have a better solution.

There are no plans to drop backwards compatibility any time soon and to my current knowledge our ingestion team here at Sentry is usually making sure that events sent from older SDK versions are still being processed.

[duncanwilcox]

That's great news. Many thanks.