Mailplane 4 incompatible with Apple Silicon ... more apps coming?

[jfruhlinger]

I'm a huge Mailplane fan and downloaded the latest update, which makes the app compatible with Big Sur. But it had a link to this note on compatibility with Apple Silicon:

https://mailplaneapp.com/help/apple_silicon_compatibility.html

Unfortunately we haven’t been able to make Mailplane 4 fully compatible with upcoming Apple Silicon Macs but we’re working on it.

It’s a major undertaking and might take a few more months until we’re ready to share something. Don’t hesitate to write us to support@mailplaneapp.com if you’re interested in a preview version.

This struck me as kind of alarming, not least because my current Macs are kind of on their last legs and I was looking forward to jumping on new AS models as they came out. Apple has been very sanguine about apps "just working" on ARM chips, even if they haven't been recompiled, thanks to Rosetta 2. Mailplane, for those who aren't familiar with it, is just a "site-specific browser" -- a wrapper that puts the Gmail website in a standalone window and offers keyboard shortcuts and other app-like behavior for it. I'm not a programmer but it seems very weird to me that anything about it would have been coded to specifically take advantage of Intel chips. Has anyone heard of any other cases like this of apps that are straight-up not compatible with Apple Silicon Macs yet?

 

[TylerL]

Mailplane 4 relies on Brave/Electron/Chromium, which is known to NOT work on Apple Silicon at the moment.
Any app that embeds a glorified Chrome browser will not work until that core is updated.
Slack, among others, is also affected.

 

[leman]

Mailplane 4 relies on Brave/Electron/Chromium, which is known to NOT work on Apple Silicon at the moment.

Electron apps will currently run under Rosetta 2, just just might not be the speediest.

 

[jfruhlinger]

Is Chrome itself not working?

 

[leman]

Is Chrome itself not working?

If I remember correctly, Chrome didn't work on the DTK because it made some assumptions about the hardware and Rosetta 2 on A12Z lacked some CPU features to provide the proper emulation environment. It should work on M1 though.

 

[aednichols]

I wonder what sort of extreme hack a mail app could possibly be doing that would prevent Rosetta from handling it.

Maybe the developers are incorrectly projecting behavior from the DTK to behavior on the real M1.

If so, they have really stepped in it and are creating massive FUD in their userbase.

 

[seek3r]

If I remember correctly, Chrome didn't work on the DTK because it made some assumptions about the hardware and Rosetta 2 on A12Z lacked some CPU features to provide the proper emulation environment. It should work on M1 though.

I legitimately can't imagine Apple releasing these machines without support for the most popular desktop browser, if they havent been working with Google to make sure Chrome is working on day one I'd be utterly amazed