Hacker News Reader

Comment by SyneRyder | Hacker News Reader

The article makes it sound like this is now resolved, but it isn't.

One of my Macs is stuck on Snow Leopard. On Lion & El Capitan, I sign in to the App Store again and it's resolved. But on Snow Leopard, it doesn't display the sign-in error like 10.7 - 10.11 do. It just complains and tells you to redownload the apps from the App Store.

But I can't. Apple doesn't let you download old versions from the Mac App Store. Byword 1.5.2 is the last version that works on 10.6, the current 2.x version requires 10.8. Similarly with Tweetbot, Mémoires, Space Gremlin, etc. Unless Apple magically allows old downloads, I don't think this can be fixed without Apple patching Snow Leopard. I'm not going to hold my breath.

It really seems like Apple has permanently broken my purchased apps.

View on HN

OS X 10.7 is unsupported as of October 2014, so I doubt Apple will be doing anything special to fix it. It still sucks that there's effectively a time limit on the software on your machine though.

Luckily, I'm able to install Windows 10 via Boot Camp on the same machine and it works really well. End-Of-Life on Windows 10 security updates is October 2025, so the machine still has plenty of life in it. It just probably won't spend much time in the Apple ecosystem anymore.

Exactly what I did on my rMBP. Thankfully it works great - the trackpad experience is not ideal but that's a small annoyance compared to not having to deal with OS X. (It feels slower for normal tasks like window switching and painting etc. but my big issues are with SMB and WiFi along with things like this App Store breakage and the constant yearly pressure to upgrade to get security and bug fixes. It's not worth it.)

Actually the other reason for me also was Visual Studio - I develop quite a bit of C/C++ code and recently moved to developing an Android app - VS Emulator for Android is a godsend - you can't do those things on OS X without trouble - Xcode is buggy and the emulator with HAXM is crashy although that's Intel's fault.

Oh my. You bought DRM'd apps and now the DRM comes to bite you. Lesson learned? Boycott companies DRM'ing.

I've just sent you an email with a link and license for non-App Store version of Mémoires that works with Snow Leopard.

This is awesome, thank you so much!

And bonus points to Dmitry of Coding Robots <https://www.codingrobots.com> for offering this, because this was partly my own fault. I'd moved and archived the app, but not actually deleted it, and this didn't clear the App Store install receipt from my computer. I had to actually move the app to the trash for OS X to remove the install receipt. Once I did, the App Store let me reinstall Mémoires again, now code signed until Feb 7 2023. But I'll now be using the non Mac App Store version Dmitry just sent me.

[No such luck with Byword though, as I still can't download the old Snow Leopard version of the app from the App Store.]

Are you really sure about that? I thought that the App Store lets you download the latest version of apps you purchased that are supported on your OS from the "purchased" tab.

Afraid not. When I click on the Install button in the Purchased tab for those apps it tells me "[App name] can't be installed on this computer, because a 64-bit Intel processor is required" or "[App Name] can't be installed on Macintosh HD, because Mac OS X version 10.7 or later is required."

(Thank you for trying to help, though!)

Reportedly, that only works for iOS apps, not OS X ones.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com