End of Rosetta Support for Intel-Based macOS Apps: What Developers Need to Know
Apple's transition to Apple silicon is concluding, impacting developers with Intel-only macOS apps.
macOS 27 will be the last release to support Rosetta. After it, Intel-only apps will not run on Apple silicon Macs at all.
Users on macOS 26.4 or later may already be seeing system notifications when they launch an app that depends on Rosetta, prompting them to update to a version that runs natively.
If you ship a Mac app that is still Intel-only, the fix is to build and distribute it as a universal binary, which runs natively on both Apple silicon and Intel Macs. If you already ship an Apple silicon version, the work is getting existing users onto it before macOS 27 arrives, since it is the old build on their machine that will stop working, not your current one.
One exception: Rosetta continues to support older, unmaintained gaming titles built on Intel-based frameworks.
Sources
- Upcoming changes to Rosetta support for Intel-based macOS apps Primary Apple Developer News
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