Here’s how to build such an installer yourself. This can mean twice as much work for you.Īnother strategy is to build a Universal installer of your own, in the form of a PKG that has the intelligence to detect what kind of computer it’s installing on and then deliver the right version. This requires you to maintain logic in your software distribution solution to ensure the right package (PKG) goes to the right Mac. One common strategy is to maintain two separate installers. So how do you efficiently deploy apps that don’t yet have Universal versions to the Mac computers you manage? (Universal apps take more time and bandwidth to build and deliver they are necessarily larger than single-architecture binaries.) Apple has been urging developers to convert their apps to Universal, but for a number of reasons, many vendors still haven’t heeded that advice. Sometimes app developers make that easier by distributing Universal apps-combined binaries that will run on either architecture. The continued coexistence of those two architectures means admins must often manage and deploy two different versions of any given app. The job of installing apps on your organization’s Mac computers-one of the most fundamental responsibilities for any Apple admin-is complicated by the fact that there are still two different Mac processor types in use: Intel and Apple silicon.