AccountEdge abandons Catalina compatibility, customers looking for alternatives

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Comments

  • Reply 41 of 71
    wizard69wizard69 Posts: 13,377member
    sflocal said:
    There are no excuses that AccountEdge can hide behind to essentially abandon their customers like that.  AccountEdge had literally years of warnings to convert their apps to 64-bit, something that is easy to do, and they failed miserably.  It's laziness at the least, incompetence at the most.

    It just shows where their priorities are, and running on MacOS is not one of them.  Shame on them.  

    I find it interesting that AccountEdge's Catalina support page blames the excuse on their "30-year-old code base", yet the next paragraph for non-Catalina users proudly proclaims "AccountEdge 2020 is now available"!  IT'S 30-YEAR-OLD-CODE!!!  What's "2020" about it?!

    Lazy company.
    Lazy maybe sleazy most certainly.    I say that because the subscription based software runs Catalina fine.   This just sounds like yet another company trying to push customers to a subscription service.  

    Now that being said accounting software is one of those things where subscription service actually make sense as the software is usually under constant revision due to changing tax laws.  Frankly it is no different than retaining a CPA or similar professional.  My problem is not giving customers a smooth transition like maybe a free 6 moth transition period to the subscription service.   
    jony0
  • Reply 42 of 71
    sflocal said:
    leehamm said:
    In other news, Intuit has had many years to make its QuickBooks software feature-compatible with the Windows version. This too did not happen. Users can't migrate from Windows to the MacOS version.
    This is one (of two) reasons why I still run Windows on my Mac.  I've been a QB user for almost 30 years and almost made the switch to QB for Mac, but halted when I read about the incompatibility between the two.

    Honestly, I don't know why companies pull stunts like this.  To develop QB for Mac & Windows, and not make the data compatible with each other is inexcusable.  I should be able to go back/forth between platforms if I wanted to and just pop in my QB data and run the software.  It's lazy methods these companies employ.
    It’s totally nutso. 
    It may boil down to something as simple as the different line endings used by Mac (newline) and Windows (carriage return linefeed). Or it might be that the original Mac devs in QB were adamant that they'd come up with a better way of storing data and implemented something that was rejected by the Windows team, and the project management folks were too tired/wimpy/incompetent to sort it out.

    Whatever the reason, I agree - it's not justifiable.
    razorpitdysamoriawatto_cobra
  • Reply 43 of 71
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,310moderator
    dysamoria said:
    digitol said:
    I Applaud account edge on this move! Once upon a time Apple would bend over backwards to be compatible with the rest of the world. Now Apple is the misbehaving ape swinging it’s conform and control arms around wildly. This behavior is causing developers to leave the platform. furthermore, business wise, financially it probably makes sense not to pursue the dying mac market. Sad. 
    I get slammed for being anti-Apple around here... and I think your comment above is pretty ridiculous. Any company that cannot update their own code to be 64-bit... while suggesting users SUBSCRIBE to a different product of theirs... is being disingenuous. What did they do, lose some of the source code??
    It won't all be their code, big apps use 3rd party libraries but the scale of the apps is also a problem. They said on their site:

    "In spite of a multi-year project that involved a team of developers and analysts, it’s a project we will not be able to complete."

    https://accountedge.com/options/

    Intuit Quickbooks is over 10 million lines of code in ~80,000 files:

    https://www.drdobbs.com/tools/building-quickbooks-how-intuit-manages-1/240003694

    Those apps are as large as operating systems. If even 1% of the app is a problem, it would take a few years of developer time to fix. Not every app faces the same problem so those companies have managed their software better. Sometimes it's better to start over. Apple has done this, they didn't migrate some of their apps to 64-bit, they EOL'd the 32-bit versions and started with new 64-bit versions.

    Ubuntu is trying to do the same:

    https://itsfoss.com/ubuntu-19-10-drops-32-bit-support/
    https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/intel-32bit-packages-on-ubuntu-from-19-10-onwards/11263/2

    "It’s no longer possible to maintain the i386 architecture to the same standard as other Ubuntu supported architectures. There is lack of support in the upstream Linux kernel, toolchains, and web browsers. Latest security features and mitigations are no longer developed in a timely fashion for the 32 bit architecture and only arrive for 64 bit.

    Maintaining the i386 archive requires significant developer and QA focus for an increasingly small audience running on what is considered legacy hardware. We cannot confidently publish i386 images any more and so have taken the decision to stop doing it. This will free up some time to focus on amd64. i386 makes up around 1% of the Ubuntu install base."

    This led to Valve saying they were dropping support for Steam on Ubuntu because it would mean old games wouldn't run. The Ubuntu team decided to include some 32-bit libraries to help:

    https://steamcommunity.com/app/221410/discussions/0/1640915206447625383/

    Keeping old architectures around isn't the ideal solution as they can pose a security risk. One of those sites mentions some of Intel's CPU security fixes not being available in 32-bit. The suggestion on the Steam page of using a light container for compatibility seems like a reasonable compromise. If an OS in a VM will run 32-bit software, stripping out the OS and just having a compatibility environment with some needed libraries would allow some software to run and it would only be installed when needed.

    The 32-bit runtime has been around for more than 40 years and hundreds of thousands of pieces of software and libraries are built on it. It's unrealistic to expect it all just to migrate to 64-bit. The inevitable result is end users lose access to good software. It's a necessary transition, just as it was from 16-bit. Fortunately, Apple did a good job of pushing developers for a long time to make 64-bit versions so it should be relatively few apps on the Mac side affected and there are options like running a VM.

    Apple's support page on this is funny:

    https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208436

    "How to contact the app developer

    Look for copyright information in the Info window. For example, Apple is the developer of this app"

    and they post a screenshot of Aperture. Apple hasn't made Aperture compatible with Catalina.

    baconstangroundaboutnowbestkeptsecretElCapitanrandominternetpersonkurai_kagedysamoriawatto_cobra
  • Reply 44 of 71
    wizard69 said:
    sflocal said:
    There are no excuses that AccountEdge can hide behind to essentially abandon their customers like that.  AccountEdge had literally years of warnings to convert their apps to 64-bit, something that is easy to do, and they failed miserably.  It's laziness at the least, incompetence at the most.

    It just shows where their priorities are, and running on MacOS is not one of them.  Shame on them.  

    I find it interesting that AccountEdge's Catalina support page blames the excuse on their "30-year-old code base", yet the next paragraph for non-Catalina users proudly proclaims "AccountEdge 2020 is now available"!  IT'S 30-YEAR-OLD-CODE!!!  What's "2020" about it?!

    Lazy company.
    Lazy maybe sleazy most certainly.    I say that because the subscription based software runs Catalina fine.   This just sounds like yet another company trying to push customers to a subscription service.  

    Now that being said accounting software is one of those things where subscription service actually make sense as the software is usually under constant revision due to changing tax laws.  Frankly it is no different than retaining a CPA or similar professional.  My problem is not giving customers a smooth transition like maybe a free 6 moth transition period to the subscription service.   
    As long as platform vendors make changes to the OS, almost all software makes sense as a subscription service. Work should be compensated fairly. We used to try and guess how many copies of a product would sell, what the total development costs were, and balance the factors to arrive at a sale price. Nowadays its a lot more feasible to determine cost per user for a given time period and simply tack a margin on to that.

    Which is not to say that all software should be $40+ per month, or hosted on behalf of the customer. But everyone wants to maximise their profit.
  • Reply 45 of 71
    wizard69wizard69 Posts: 13,377member
    darkpaw said:
    frank777 said:
    Does it make any sense to spend time recoding this 30-year-old software? No.
    I can't believe the whole thing is 30 years old. They'll have been updating it to maintain compatibility with new version of OS X/macOS, and also to make use of various new features. It can only be a small portion of the software that they're having trouble with, and if so, what trouble are they having? Are they relying on third-party libraries that aren't compiled for 64-bit? There will likely be replacements. I don't think this was a good move on their part.
    It is a justification for moving customers to the “hosted” solution and collecting monthly fees.   Note I’m not really opposed to this type of software charging a monthly fee.   It is not that much different than paying an accountant or other service a monthly or quarterly fee.   I just think it is sleazy for the company not to offer a reduced difficulty transition solution.   The way this has been handled is very much disruptive to the client base.  
  • Reply 46 of 71
    wizard69wizard69 Posts: 13,377member
    sflocal said:
    leehamm said:
    In other news, Intuit has had many years to make its QuickBooks software feature-compatible with the Windows version. This too did not happen. Users can't migrate from Windows to the MacOS version.
    This is one (of two) reasons why I still run Windows on my Mac.  I've been a QB user for almost 30 years and almost made the switch to QB for Mac, but halted when I read about the incompatibility between the two.

    Honestly, I don't know why companies pull stunts like this.  To develop QB for Mac & Windows, and not make the data compatible with each other is inexcusable.  I should be able to go back/forth between platforms if I wanted to and just pop in my QB data and run the software.  It's lazy methods these companies employ.
    It does make you wonder.   Maybe I’m wrong (it’s been known to happen) but you would think that defining your data would come first in an accounting programs.   Accounting is almost a perfect example of storing and processing data.  Even if the functionality varied a bit between apps you would think that the data would remain the same.  
  • Reply 47 of 71
    sflocalsflocal Posts: 6,092member
    sflocal said:
    There are no excuses that AccountEdge can hide behind to essentially abandon their customers like that.  AccountEdge had literally years of warnings to convert their apps to 64-bit, something that is easy to do, and they failed miserably.  It's laziness at the least, incompetence at the most.

    It just shows where their priorities are, and running on MacOS is not one of them.  Shame on them.  

    I find it interesting that AccountEdge's Catalina support page blames the excuse on their "30-year-old code base", yet the next paragraph for non-Catalina users proudly proclaims "AccountEdge 2020 is now available"!  IT'S 30-YEAR-OLD-CODE!!!  What's "2020" about it?!

    Lazy company.
    Why are you so upset with them? They have determined that it isn’t worth the investment to support Catalina. It’s their money.
    It's not that they decided to not support Catalina, it's how they notified their users.  They literally screwed their loyal customers, some who bought new Macs only to discover it won't work.  They had 10+ years to do the 64-bit migration and did nothing but collect more money from their customers and left them high and dry.  That should upset anyone using their software.  Inexcusable.  It gives the entire industry a bad rap when lazy management and clueless "developers" drop the ball.
    DonaldRWdysamoriawatto_cobra
  • Reply 48 of 71
    wizard69wizard69 Posts: 13,377member

    The Mac market is not “dying”. 
    maybe Not dying but certainly under a lot of stress.  The entire hardware line up is pretty pathetic.  Even the new Mac Pro, as nicely engineered as it is has very limited appeal.  The rest of the hardware line up goes far to long without serious updates.  The iMacs have become embarrassingly  bad values and have some of the slowest secondary storage shipping in modern hardware.    I have no idea what the laptop line is suppose to be but every year you get less for your money.  

    On the flip side I actually like that Mac OS is mature and doesn’t change radically every year.   A stable OS is a good thing.   But even here Mac OS could use more attention than it is getting.  

    So yeah a troll but on the other hand the Mac platform is in a pathetic state if you consider it objectively.  
    ElCapitandysamoria
  • Reply 49 of 71
    sflocalsflocal Posts: 6,092member
    wizard69 said:
    sflocal said:
    There are no excuses that AccountEdge can hide behind to essentially abandon their customers like that.  AccountEdge had literally years of warnings to convert their apps to 64-bit, something that is easy to do, and they failed miserably.  It's laziness at the least, incompetence at the most.

    It just shows where their priorities are, and running on MacOS is not one of them.  Shame on them.  

    I find it interesting that AccountEdge's Catalina support page blames the excuse on their "30-year-old code base", yet the next paragraph for non-Catalina users proudly proclaims "AccountEdge 2020 is now available"!  IT'S 30-YEAR-OLD-CODE!!!  What's "2020" about it?!

    Lazy company.
    Lazy maybe sleazy most certainly.    I say that because the subscription based software runs Catalina fine.   This just sounds like yet another company trying to push customers to a subscription service.  

    Now that being said accounting software is one of those things where subscription service actually make sense as the software is usually under constant revision due to changing tax laws.  Frankly it is no different than retaining a CPA or similar professional.  My problem is not giving customers a smooth transition like maybe a free 6 moth transition period to the subscription service.   
    I think the subscription-based version is cloud-based, and from what I've been reading it might be something similar to remote-desktop to a cloud-server.  Not very polished to say the least.
  • Reply 50 of 71
    Not an ideal solution, but may be easier to run a Mojave virtual machine inside VMWare Fusion, rather than Windows in a virtual machine. I set up a Mojave VM to run a legacy Brother Scanner, and it works. 
    GG1taugust04_aiwatto_cobra
  • Reply 51 of 71
    Moneyworks may be a perpetual license option for some, and even the prior version (7) seems 64 bit... At last check files open mac or pc, they offer a complimentary accountant license and free email support. One caveat: edits inconsistently must use reversing entries and/or posting, so even minor errors can mess things up pretty quickly...

    When I read the vitriol on here (in this new online age of rage) I have to ask how many of the critics actually do their own accounting and migrations ? From this perch accounting has seemed a constant battle since AccPac on a mac classic, including MYOB>AccountEdge, QuickBooks Mac <> PC and others. At this point I have found Numbers is actually an alternative simple option for basic cash based accounting, using the sort/sum capability thankfully reintroduced recently after the program was gutted for iCloud sync.

    Many sole or small firms I know use macs because they are supposed to be easier, and may have modest or complex needs that may preclude books or even more accountant costs at $$$/hr irrespective of the obvious cloud costs and privacy concerns.

    I have hundreds of hits when I do a 32 bit app search, and so I am looking at an iMac Pro to run High Sierra for the indeterminate future anticipating a ground up rebuild which will not be fun nor profitable. Since apps like Creative Suite are no longer perpetual such will need to run virtualized if even possible, and my experience with virtualization is less than 100% functionality.

    Windows 10 seems to offer 32 bit emulation, perhaps understanding business needs better, including legal record keeping requirements and data access, and so is this actually fundamentally an Apple issue (let the flames begin) externalizing the costs and effort to others as some corporations tend to do? There will be solutions, at the expense of the developers and customers, which is maybe the way it should be, although I am reminded of 'it just works' and 'a computer for the rest of us'...?
    edited January 2020
  • Reply 52 of 71
    flydogflydog Posts: 1,123member
    digitol said:
    I Applaud account edge on this move! Once upon a time Apple would bend over backwards to be compatible with the rest of the world. Now Apple is the misbehaving ape swinging it’s conform and control arms around wildly. This behavior is causing developers to leave the platform. furthermore, business wise, financially it probably makes sense not to pursue the dying mac market. Sad. 
    Clearly you have no clue, and decided to post this rant because Apple rubbed you the wrong way. 

    The fact that this company is relying on 30 year old code that cannot be converted to 64 bit speaks volumes as to their incompetence. In addition, they clearly don’t care about the security of their customer’s data since they plan to continue on relying on their crappy insecure code base instead of replacing it. 

    The most comical aspect of this whole thing is they actually disclosed that their code is 30 years old and so decrepit and outdated that it can’t be converted to 64 bit, which is something that can be done by tapping a button in Xcode. 
  • Reply 53 of 71
    flydogflydog Posts: 1,123member

    rob53 said:
    Not that it should make any difference but Priority Software is headquartered in Israel. It appears all of its management team (see website) is Israeli. I have to wonder if their refusal to upgrade the Mac version has anything to do with possible security issues implemented in Catalina. When I was working for a US government contractor, we had to get special permission to buy anything manufactured in Israel, mainly because of security issues.
    Yeah because 30 year old code is far more secure 🙄
  • Reply 54 of 71
    jdwjdw Posts: 1,324member
    I can't help but chuckle at all this.  I still have High Sierra running on all my Macs because neither Mojave nor Catalina have anything to improve my computing experience.  I say this as a Mac lover who updated religiously to every new MacOS version, up through High Sierra.   But an upgrade beyond High Sierra meant breaking compatibility with some apps I still want to use which are not updated.  

    You really can use a Mac without running the latest OS on it unless you buy a new one, in which case I can only sympathize with your plight.  Catalina especially is a hard choice.  On the one hand, Metal has been improved in Catalina so FCPX performance is noticeably faster than High Sierra.  Also, updating MacOS is required to even install the latest version of FCPX.  However, that app would be the only benefit to me in updating to Catalina.  And that's why I am still on High Sierra and very satisfied.  

    Most companies keep at least one older computer around to run legacy software. While that can be potentially dangerous if the machine is too old, Apple still supports High Sierra security updates so it's not an issue right now.

    High Sierra...  It does a Mac good.
    baconstang
  • Reply 55 of 71
    mjtomlinmjtomlin Posts: 2,673member
    Sounds to me like they’re using some kind of 3rd party library that cannot be updated because that company went out of business before 2005 when Apple started making the transition to 64-bit. Whatever this “critical” piece of code is, they are obviously unable to write their own version.

    OR...

    They really want their small Mac user base to move to the more expensive cloud subscription version. Where they can make more money doing less work.
    baconstang
  • Reply 56 of 71
    Remember when Quark refused then delayed an OS X version of XPress and pursued a PR campaign telling their customers to switch to Windows. 2020 - Who or what is a Quark XPress ?
    FileMakerFeller
  • Reply 57 of 71
    Hey @Marvin, always love what you bring to the forum. Your posts are always informative and interesting.
    Marvin
  • Reply 58 of 71
    chadbagchadbag Posts: 1,999member
    For them out is not just a simple checkbox in Xcode. Based on its age and history I am 99.9% sure that this is a Carbon app, which would be C  or C++ and Carbon API.  No objective-C or Swift. No Cocoa. No switch in Xcode for 64 bit.  

    Apple did not make a 64 bit Carbon ever.   So they are basically stuck with starting from scratch.   Carbon and Cocoa are so different that there is probably very little code that can be re-used.  

    While Carbon was deprecated long ago, Catalina is the first macOS/OS X release to totally drop support for it. 

    Unless they were to basically start  from scratch they really have no good choice. 
    razorpitFileMakerFeller
  • Reply 59 of 71
    It's not just a matter of converting 32-bit code to 64-bit code by recompiling. In 30 years there have been plenty of other changes under the hood. Significant parts of the code must precede MacOS X in any form, so to get it just to MacOS X they Carbonized their app. You can't convert from Carbon to Cocoa by changing compiler switches; significant parts of the app must be rewritten. There is no 64-bit version of Carbon. Meanwhile, the developers who wrote their app's original code and understood it have moved to other jobs, retired, or died; it's been 30 years. Because the software company has been coasting along using Carbon for all this time, all their deferred maintenance is hitting them at once. Carbon APIs have been deprecated since 2012, and the warnings have been getting louder since. In 2017 Apple announced that there would be performance consequences; then the 32-bit apps started getting warnings on launch, and they were told the end was near, and in 2019, seven years after the first warning, they finally eliminated the deprecated libraries. I use other code based on Carbon, which has not really been maintained in years. Up until now, it still worked. For one, the code was developed by a one-person shop, then sold. New maintainers have produced further updates on Windows, but not on Mac. The old Mac code costs $200 per seat still; the new code (on Windows) costs $500 for a license. Code frequently benefits from being rewritten to take advantage of new technologies, but for apps that don't generate enough revenue for proper maintenance or where the owners are primarily rent seekers unwilling to invest, this is what happens. It's bad news for the licensed users, but it's not all on Apple.
    entropysFileMakerFeller
  • Reply 60 of 71
    saareksaarek Posts: 1,520member
    I’ve not upgraded my Mac because YNAB is not 64 bit and never will be.

    As with this company they suggest I try out their fancy web based subscription model.

    I’ll never go that route, it’s a rip off compared to the old method.

    Previously it was buy this software for £40 and use for years before a compelling upgrade came along. Now they want £5 a month which means every month after month 8 I get shafted.

    Subscription services like Netflix or Apple Music make sense. For the price of a single movie or album I can watch/listen to everything. 

    For cases like this it just means lost customers. I’m actively looking for a YNAB alternative, I bet the customers of these fools are now too.
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