Yesterday I showed how macOS has changed over the last five years, from 10.14 Mojave to 15.2 Sequoia, in terms of architecture and numbers. One figure

How macOS has become more private

submited by

Style Pass

2025-01-02 16:30:04

Yesterday I showed how macOS has changed over the last five years, from 10.14 Mojave to 15.2 Sequoia, in terms of architecture and numbers. One figure I gave was how /System/Library increased in the number of bundles it contained from just under 4,800 in Mojave to over 9,000 in Sequoia. Within that folder, greatest growth has been in Private Frameworks, which have risen from under 1,800 to more than 4,300.

In fact, to be more precise, the number of real bundles in the Private Frameworks folder isn’t as large, as my directory crawler that analyses each release of macOS counts most of those frameworks twice, because of their structure. Halving the numbers returned still shows great growth in Private Frameworks, though:

This chart provides better detail of these changes, as it gives the percentage of frameworks that were private over time. That percentage is: PrivateFrameworks x 100 / TotalFrameworks where PrivateFrameworks is the corrected (halved) number of Private Framework bundles, and TotalFrameworks is the sum of PrivateFrameworks and PublicFrameworks, the corrected number of public Framework bundles.

Each new major version of macOS over this period has brought a substantial increase in the percentage of Private Frameworks, rising from 76% in May 2019 to 84% in December 2024. Over that period, macOS has become increasingly private. Although the greatest increases have largely coincided with the release of new families of M-series chips, the largest rise of all was of 2.1% with the release of macOS 12.0.1, nine months before the release of M2 Macs.