Where‘s Little Snitch 3.2?

Those of you who pay close attention to Little Snitch’s version numbering might have wondered why there’s no Little Snitch 3.2, but a Little Snitch 3.3.

If you payed really close attention over the last few months, you might even wonder why there were a total of six Little Snitch 3.2 nightly builds (a.k.a. beta versions), but no Little Snitch 3.2 final release. (The release notes for these nightly builds even mentioned fixes related to OS X Mavericks!)

So why did we jump from Little Snitch 3.1.3 straight to Little Snitch 3.3?

The answer to these questions is pretty simple: Apple made us do it.

They didn’t call and ask us to artificially inflate the version number or anything like that. It’s just that when you download and install the new OS X Mavericks from the App Store, it specifically checks for Little Snitch “version 3.2” and earlier during the upgrade. If the OS X installer finds such a version, it moves it to the “/Incompatible Software” folder and you get an alert telling you this version of Little Snitch won’t work on that version of OS X.

To work around this, we just had to increase the version number to anything higher than 3.2. Otherwise, Little Snitch would have stopped working when you upgraded from OS X Mountain Lion to OS X Mavericks.

This isn’t an attempt by Apple to block Little Snitch or anything like that – they could do things that are much more effective than that. Instead, this should be seen as Apple making sure no software that wasn’t tested against the newest OS X release can cause troubles. And isn’t that nice?