Before updating your operating system, always check our website.
- If you own the latest version of our software, you may need to download an update that supports the new version of your OS.
- If you own an older version of our software, you will need to check that it still works on the new OS.
We ensure that the current versions of our software work on the latest versions of the operating systems we support. For instance, when Apple moved from macOS 10.15 to macOS 11, we released Scrivener 3.2 as a free update to support macOS 11.
Usually, older versions of our software will carry on working just fine on newer operating systems, but if you’re not using our latest updates we cannot guarantee this. Sometimes, Apple or Microsoft makes major changes that cause older software to break.
This happened when Apple moved from macOS 10.14 (Mojave) to 10.15 (Catalina) and dropped support for 32-bit apps. Scrivener 2 was 32-bit; converting it to 64-bit involved a significant rewrite of core code and was part of the massive Scrivener 3 upgrade. By the time Catalina was released in late 2019, the 64-bit Scrivener 3 had been the current version for two years and there was no practical way for us to update the old Scrivener 2 codebase to work on Catalina. This meant that if you were a Scrivener 2 user and chose to update to Catalina, the only way you could continue using Scrivener was to pay for the (discounted) upgrade to Scrivener 3.
While our licences are perpetual for the version you buy, if you choose to stay on an older version, it’s up to you to ensure that it will still work with any new operating system you wish to install. It’s therefore a good idea before updating your OS to check on our website that the version you own is compatible.