Over the past few days we’ve released new versions of the itch app, butler, and itch-setup. This is the first stable app release in a while, and it includes a bunch of improvements across the board.
Most importantly, we’ve fully modernized our build and release infrastructure. All of our builds are now built, signed, and deployed through our new CI actions, with new signing certificates. This means we can start pushing app and butler updates on a regular basis again. Expect more frequent releases going forward.
You can read individual release notes here:
Here’s a summary of what’s new:
Native Apple Silicon Support
The app now runs natively on arm64 macOS (Apple Silicon). The auto-updater will automatically pull the correct version for your system. All supplemental binaries (butler, itch-setup) will also be replaced with their arm64 equivalents automatically on update. The app should start faster, run faster, and have less impact on your battery since it no longer needs to run through emulation on modern macs.
Butler also now has native builds for Linux ARM64, and a Universal macOS build.
New OAuth Login
The default login method is now an OAuth flow that opens your browser to complete authentication. This replaces the in-app username & password login as the default. Password login remains available as a fallback. We’re making this change because password-based API login endpoints are frequent targets for credential stuffing attacks, and our attempt at a captcha to prevent attacks didn’t work reliably in Electron.
Assuming that the new OAuth flow works well, we will eventually remove password login entirely in a future release. If you have any issues with the new login flow, please let us know.
Electron & Build Updates
- Upgraded to Electron 25 (from Electron 22). We wanted to get this intermediate release out before we deploy the rest of the Electron updates. The kitch branch is already testing newer versions of Electron https://github.com/itchio/itch/releases/tag/v26.7.0-canary. Large bumps in Electron also raise the operating system minimum requirements, so we want to make sure we have a stable release checkpoints as we move to the latest version of Electron.
- 32-bit builds are fully retired
- Butler is now built with Go 1.24 with major dependency updates across the board.
- The itch installer now ships a AppImage binary for Linux
Accessibility
We did a pass over all clickable button like elements to ensure that they use semantic HTML elements to ensure that they can be navigated to and activated with a keyboard.
- Clickable elements now use semantic HTML (
<button>,<a>) for keyboard navigation and screen reader support - Modal dialogs use the native
<dialog>element with proper focus trapping - Icons have proper
aria-labelattributes for screen readers
Bug Fixes
- Set user agent fallback to avoid Cloudflare issues. We introduced Cloudflare late last year and it was causing issues with infinite human verification loops within the app’s browser. If you still are experiencing issues please tell us.
- Fix errors related to
/register,/random, and other system pages generating incorrect URLs - Fix context menus when clicking games
- Fix clipboard operations in the URL bar and login form
- Better support for AppImage and other bare Linux executables
- Various bug fixes
Other
- macOS uninstall support for itch-setup (
--uninstall) - Synchronized localization strings
How to Update
Your app should auto-update, but if you run into any issues you can grab the latest installer from https://itch.io/app. If you’ve manually installed butler, you can download the latest version from https://itchio.itch.io/butler.
If you have any issues with updating, feel free to post a reply here.