Tact continues on its path to get to the App Store. We have built features and fixed bugs throughout past months. Some of them, like private rename, are on this blog. We haven’t yet managed to post about other useful changes we’ve made, like chat archiving and public chat links. Nevertheless, the work continues.

This post is about two changes in what you need to run Tact, and how you access the macOS public beta.

Tact now requires iOS 15 and macOS 12 Monterey

We say in our principles that we may drop support for older devices and operating systems. In practice, Tact will for the time being have “one version back” policy, supporting the current public OS version, and one previous version. We are looking ahead to this fall, where iOS 16 and macOS 13 Ventura will be released. We are already now upgrading the Tact system requirement with this in mind, and Tact thus now requires iOS 15 and macOS 12 Monterey.

This OS support will be in place for one year, until Apple announces their next platform versions at next year’s WWDC. We will re-evaluate our OS support then, based on Apple’s platform plans and the community response to Tact.

macOS public beta is now on TestFlight

We have always distributed the Tact public beta for iOS with TestFlight. For macOS, we offered the beta as a direct download with a nice custom updater, not least because Tact supported macOS 11 Big Sur while TestFlight for Mac, which was released in 2021, requires macOS 12 Monterey.

The custom updater and downloader we were using aren’t compatible with how Apple distributes software via TestFlight and app store, so we removed it from Tact and are moving Tact for macOS public beta to TestFlight.

To join or continue with Tact macOS public beta, join our TestFlight public beta with this link. The link is the same for our macOS and iOS public betas, and you participate in both together. The link shows you instructions to download the TestFlight app from App Store for your platform, where you can then install Tact, and keep updating it there. You will get emails when we publish new builds.