censhare Client support on macOS

Currently, the censhare Client does not officially support macOS Big Sur. Internal tests with version 2019.3.2 on Big Sur 11.01  and Big Sur 11.1 have shown no issues so far with the censhare Client, but any use in production systems is at your own risk.

As soon as internal tests are completed, censhare will release Big Sur-compatible versions of the censhare Client. Please follow our announcements to plan your upgrade to macOS Big Sur.

Which censhare Client versions will support macOS Big Sur has not yet been decided. Please follow our announcements to plan your upgrade to macOS Big Sur.

The release of macOS Big Sur also marks the transition to the new Apple ARM architecture of their hardware. Applications can run on the new Apple ARM-based platforms in two ways:

• Native: For this way, applications must be ported to run on the new M1 architecture.
• Legacy: For this way, applications run in the Rosetta translation environment. This allows Intel-based applications to run in the new architecture. The Rosetta translation environment is part of macOS Big Sur.

When you upgrade your hardware to Apple ARM-based platforms, any Big Sur-compatible censhare Client can run in the Rosetta translation environment as is. However, a VFS that uses Kernel extension (Kext) and that runs on macOS Big Sur with an Intel architecture hardware, will no longer work on the Apple ARM architecture.

Internal tests with version 2019.3.2 on Big Sur 11.01 and Big Sur 11.1 have shown no issues so far with the VFS, but any use in production systems is at your own risk.

censhare is preparing the release of a macOS Big Sur compatible VFS version together with the  censhare Client release. This censhare Client with VFS supports macOS Big Sur only on Intel architecture Macs.

The censhare Client with VFS 2.0 can be installed on Apple ARM-based platforms. This requires to boot the computer once in recovery mode and change the Kernel security settings to allow Kernel extensions. Currently, this works on macOS Big Sur version 11.3.1. In future releases, Apple might deprecate and remove the possibility to allow kernel extensions. See here how to do this.

The censhare Client runs in the Rosetta translation environment without any restrictions. Whether a native Apple ARM censhare Client will be released is currently under investigation at censhare. Please follow our announcements on this topic.

As of today, Apple has not released a system extension API to replace the Kernel extensions in the VFS. We are following Apple's announcements and releases on this topic. However, censhare can only start to investigate in and develop the upgrade of the VFS to an ARM-compatible version if Apple provides a system extensions API with the required functionality.

Adobe 2020 apps (version 15.x)  are not officially compatible with macOS Big Sur. Internal test have shown no issues so far with InDesign 2020, but any use in production systems is at your own risk.

Adobe 2021 apps (version 16.0 and higher) are stated as compatible with macOS Big Sur, but are not production-ready due to known issues reported by Adobe.

In general, the Adobe plugin has only little dependencies to the OS on its own. However, it must be adapted and built for major versions of Adobe applications. Likewise, a censhare Client version is required that supports the respective Adobe product version. Therefore, the dependencies of the Adobe plugin exist towards the Adobe version and the censhare Client version, but not directly towards the OS.

censhare is preparing an Adobe plugin release compatible with Adobe 2021 apps (version 16.x). Which censhare versions will get this support has not yet been decided. Please follow our announcements to plan your upgrade to macOS Big Sur.

As of today, the Adobe 2021 apps are only available for Intel architecture Macs. Therefore, the plugin for Adobe 2021 will also be available for the Intel architecture. If you run the Adobe 2021 apps and the plugin on Apple ARM-based platforms, both will be executed inside the Rosetta translation environment.

When Adobe releases native 2021 apps for Apple ARM-based platforms, the plugin needs to be upgraded and built for this platform on its own. As of today, Adobe has not not yet announced when they will take this step and provide developers with the required SDK.