See which apps will no longer work with macOS Catalina

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Learn how to see which of your apps will no longer work with macOS Catalina.

32-bit-mac-app-not-optimized - Dans Tutorials

Are you planning on upgrading to macOS Catalina? You may want to read this first. Why? macOS Catalina brings a lot of changes to your Mac, mostly good. The OS is more secure, and Apple separated iTunes into three apps, as an example. But with these changes also come complications. If you use an app outside of iTunes to manage your music, that app may no longer work. Software used by DJs seems to be the one I am hearing about now.

But more than that, some of your older apps may no longer work! Apple is no longer supporting apps that run in 32-bit mode. How do you know if an app is 32-bit? One way is by macOS Mojave showing you a dialog saying the app ‘is not optimized for your Mac’ when you open an app. This is Apple’s way of saying they can’t guarantee it will work in the future. Well, the future is macOS Catalina.

Another way of seeing which apps are 32-bit is to go to your Apple Menu and select About this Mac. Then, under the Overview tab, click on System Report. The System Information app will open detailing all kinds of information about your Mac, including which apps are 32-bit. You’ll find this under Software/Applications. One of the columns is for showing if an app is 64-bit or not. You may have to scroll over to see this column. What you’ll want to do is sort by this column, and any app that has No will not open in macOS Catalina. Many of the apps in the list will be from Apple; you don’t need to worry about those unless you use iMovie ’09 or the older version of iWork. Instead, look for the ones that say Identified Developer.

To prevent your Mac from notifying you on a regular basis, or even updating on it’s own, you’ll want to go to your System Preferences and then select Software Update. Uncheck the box for Automatically keep my Mac up to date. I would recommend you click on Advanced and make sure your Mac will still install security updates. This will keep your Mac secure, but not nag you to update to macOS Catalina on a regular basis.

Video Transcript (video also has closed captions):

macOS Catalina will no longer run 32-bit apps. How do we know which apps we have installed that are 32 bit? Let’s find out. Let’s go to my Mac. One way is to open up the app. If you have a dialog box such as this, I opened up CSS edit; this is a 32-bit app. If you have a dialog box like this, when you open your app, it will not run on Mac OS Catalina.

It’s a 32-bit app. So for you’re opening up an app and having this dialog box, there’s a good chance that it will not run on macOS Catalina. How do you see all of your apps that are 32 bit? While what we need to do is, we need to go up to our Apple menu. And then we go over to about this Mac from here.

What we need to do is we need to go to our system report. This is going to open up a new app when I click on it. It’s going to open up system information. It’s not a new app, but it’s going to open up a different app here. This is going to give us all of the information about our Mac. In my case, my iMac here, while under software here, you’re going to see applications.

When I click on applications, I can see all of my different applications that I haven’t stalled on my Mac. I will also be able to see if they are 32-bit apps. So right now, it is accumulating the information, all of my different apps. And now we can see all of my apps. What I’m going to do is I’m going to drag this preference pain here or this pain down here a little bit to open it up, and we can see all of my apps.

We have the application name. And then we have the version. While if I swipe over to the left, we have more columns. So I’m going to swipe over, and you’re going to see, I have more columns. One of them being 64 bit. What I’m going to do is I’m going to make this window a little bit larger so we can see this.

So I’m just going to go and drag this over to the left a little bit. And we’re going to drag this over to the right, and I’m going to make this column a little bit smaller. So now, I can see all of my apps that are 64 bits. What I’m also going to do is I’m going to sort them. I click on it, and now they’re sorted.

So all of these apps here that say no are not 64 bit; they are 32 bit. Any of these apps will not open and macOS Catalina. Some of these apps will be from Apple, such as iMovie or Numbers or Pages. If you’re using those older versions of Apple’s apps, you will no longer be able to use them when you upgrade to macOS Catalina.

But also, you’re going to see; I have a lot of third-party apps. We have unknown and identified developer. These are third-party apps, any one of these apps. So I have Adobe Photoshop CS. This is actually what I use on a regular basis. When I upgrade to macOS Catalina, I will no longer be able to use this Photoshop version.

Remember how I had a dialog box for CSS edit? Well, let’s swipe up here, and you get a CSS Edit. Add it over on the right. We have the no. Which means it is a 32-bit app. These apps here are 32 bit, and they will no longer work when you upgrade to macOS Catalina. So before you upgrade to macOS Catalina, what I would recommend doing is going up to the Apple menu, going to about this Mac, and then clicking on system report.

From there, it’s going to open up the app system information, click on applications under software and then swipe, or until you see the column four 64 bit sort by that. And any app that has a no will no longer run it, maca West Catalina. So if you rely on that app, you probably do not want to upgrade to macOS Catalina until you find a replacement for that app. So that’s how we can easily see which apps will run on macOS Catalina if we were to upgrade to macOS Catalina on the Mac.

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