Apple's macOS Catalina is breaking so many apps

Have you upgraded to macOS Catalina? If you have, chances are you’ve experienced a problem with one of your apps. I, personally, have been experiencing issues with my music app of choice, Roon, going on two weeks now. And I’m not alone.

But it’s not just Roon that’s having problems running on macOS Catalina, there are a whole host of other applications also having trouble. In fact, Apple blogger, Steve Moser, over at The Tape Drive, has compiled a list of 235 apps and counting that aren’t supported in Catalina. That includes some versions of Transmit, 1Password, QuickBooks, VMWare Fusion, Adobe Photoshop, and Parallels.

If you are using Roon as a Remote on Catalina, everything works just fine, however, if you are using your Mac as the Core, the app is unable to gain the necessary permissions on macOS Catalina to access one external drives, in my case, my external Thunderbolt 3 drive where my local music is stored–which of course means that part of my music collection is missing from my library at the moment. Frustrating, indeed.

Having been two weeks since the release of macOS Catalina and still no fix issued by Roon, I decided to reach out to see what I could learn about the latest status on releasing a fix for the bugs with Catalina. Shortly after my tweet, I received an email from Dipin Sehdev, the VP, Marketing at Roon and scheduled some time for a brief call.

“It’s terrible,” said Mr. Sehdev, “We stopped all development and our entire team is working on this.” This, of course being a fix for the permissions issues being experienced with macOS Catalina and Roon. According to Mr. Sehdev, the team, which has been mostly quiet due to being heads down working on a fix, is very close to shipping the update. “It’s coming,” he went on to say. When I pressed for a more specific time table, I was told, “as soon as it’s ready.” Which hopefully means very soon.

I feel bad for companies who are put in these kinds of positions. When you’re at the whim of a company like Apple it can be extremely difficult. If you’re experiencing an issue with an app, you’re not alone. Unfortunately though, the only thing you can do is wait for an update to fix whatever issues you’re having.