Can it really be seen as deprecating an old version when it’s a brand new app?

+1. He's not taking anything away because you never had it.

I'm a bit confused as the Mac App Store says it's over 4 years old.

The 4+ Age rating is like, who can use the app. Not for 3 year olds, apparently.

I feel like that's true for most of the relatively low-level disk and partition management tooling. As unpopular an opinion as it may lately be around here, I'm enough of a pedagogical traditionalist to remain convinced that introductory logical volume management is best left at least till kindergarten.

Despite knowing this is the correct interpretation, I still consistently make the same incorrect interpretation as the parent comment. It would be nice if they made this more intuitive. Glad I’m not the only one that’s made that mistake.

The way they specify this has always confused me, because I actually care more about how old the app is than what age range it's aimed for

He wanted to write it in Swift 6. Does it support older OS versions?

Swift 6 is not the problem. It's backward compatible.

The problem is SwiftUI. It's very new, still barely usable on the Mac, but they are adding lots of new features every macOS release.

If you want to support older versions of macOS you can't use the nice stuff they just released. Eg. pointerStyle() is a brand new macOS 15 API that is very useful.

I can’t remember for sure but there may also have been a recent file system API he said he needed. Or a bug that he had to wait for a fix on.

It's been a while since I last looked at SwiftUI on mac, Is it really still that bad ?

It's not bad, just limited. I think it's getting usable, but just barely so.

They are working on it, and making it better every year. I've started using it for small projects and it's pretty neat how fast you can work with it -- but not everything can be done yet.

Since they are still adding pretty basic stuff every year, it really hurts if you target older versions. AppKit is so mature that for most people it doesn't matter if you can't use new features introduced in the last 3 years. For SwiftUI it still makes a big difference.

I wonder why they haven't tried to back port SwiftUI improvements/versions to the older OSs. Seems like this should have been possible.

He’s likely using APIs that only exist in macOS 15.

Came here to post the same thing. Would love to try the application, but I guess not if the developer is deliberately excluding my device (which cannot run the bleeding edge OS).

In fairness, I don't think you can describe it as bleeding edge when we're 5 months into the annual 12 month upgrade cycle. It's recent, but not exactly an early adapter version at this point.

It's a new app, seems logical they might limit the audience at the start, with plans to expand in the future.

The developer deliberately chose to write it in Swift 6. Apple is the one who deliberately excluded Swift 6 from your device.

Yea, too bad :( Everyone involved with macOS and iOS development seems to be (intentionally or unintentionally) keeping us on the hardware treadmill.

Expensive. Keeping us on the expensive hardware treadmill. My guess is that it cannot be listed in the Apple store unless its only for Macs released in the last 11 months.

This isn’t true you can set the target multiple versions back. The main problem right now is a huge amount of churn in the language, APIs and multiple UI frameworks means everything is a moving target. SwiftUI has only really become useable in the last coupe of versions.

Every time Xcode updates, it seems a few more older macOS and iOS versions are removed from the list of "Minimum Deployment Versions". My current Xcode lets me target macOS back to 10.13 (High Sierra, 7 years old) and iOS 12.0 (6 years old). This seems... rather limiting. Like, I'd be leaving a lot of users out in the cold if I were actually releasing apps anymore. And this is Xcode 15.2, on a dev host Mac forever stuck on macOS 13.7. I'm sure newer Mac/Xcode combinations are even more limiting.

I used to be a hardcore Apple/Mac guy, but I'm kind of giving up on the ecosystem. Even the dev tools are keeping everyone on the treadmill.

You can keep using an older version of Xcode if you like. I mean, every other tool chain that I can think of does more or less the same thing. There are plenty of reasons to criticise Apple's developer tooling and relations, but I don't see this as being especially different to other platforms