Dear John,
We were all drawn to one of your [social media] posts today and the whole team discussed it before replying [, we then also decided to post this reply officially on our knowledgebase].
I can’t say we are happy to read customer feedback like yours (who will?), but we truly value your opinion and despite all uneasy words you used in relation to our customer support, we want to apologize and speak out for our position on major upgrades of Disk Drill and, frankly, macOS.
Some time ago, it was probably 2011, Apple changed the way apps like Disk Drill could access disk drives. It’s no secret, data recovery requires you to have full direct access to your storage devices to carve recoverable information out and bring it back to life. With one of the betas of Mac OS X released those days, it was obvious Apple did not want that to happen. In order to keep Disk Drill available, we had to rewrite about 70% of the low-core code. This is exactly the case when we know Disk Drill is ready to announce a major upgrade.
This happens almost every year with the major upgrades of macOS. We truly wish Apple could be more open about upcoming changes in the core frameworks and libraries of their OS, but it almost never happens. More than that, software developers are usually the ones to discover and report system-level bugs in their products to Apple.
macOS Sierra was no exception to this story. Apple removed several critical Objective C technologies in Sierra, including parts of openssl library that were critical for Disk Drill v2; apps no longer can access /Volumes folder, so v2 could no longer mount disks and preview recoverable files. UI issues were everywhere as autolayout needed severe updates in v2 to be compatible with Sierra. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Disk Drill 2.x could not run on 10.12 Sierra because of this.
We had to sit down again and recreate our app from the ground up to add support for the latest OS. Do you think we shouldn’t have done it? Or do we need to release Disk Drill 3 as a free upgrade to past users? If we did, that would eventually bring us to the point when further development becomes financially impossible, and adapting our technology to the new whims of Apple devs will just not happen. The choice between charging for updates and not releasing those updates at all is obvious, isn’t it? So, we are not quite in favor of your statement about “disgusting practices”. You can always secure the availability of all future updates to your Disk Drill by purchasing our Lifetime Upgrades Guarantee for as little as $29.
We are not in a position to foresee what further changes are coming to Apple’s platform, that’s why we release updates when the new technology becomes available to the market. We always ensure backwards compatibility with Disk Drill: buying the latest version you always get access to all previous releases automatically. However, you don’t expect your Cadillac DeVille to automatically get converted to EV for free when combustion engines become obsolete, right? We never made any commitments to making any single version of our product available for ALL future releases of operating systems and hardware.
Thank you for your understanding.
.updated: June 3, 2021 author: