iOS 14 beta and Mojave: Reminders format?

Hi, all. My Mac is still running Mojave - I am planning to skip Catalina and move straight to Big Sur in the fall after resolving some lingering dependencies on 32-bit software.

While iOS 13 introduced a new Reminders format offering new features, they allowed you to postpone updating your existing reminders in order to preserve sync compatibility with older devices.

I’m thinking about trying out the iOS 14 public beta, but would like to know: can you still forego updating Reminders to the iOS 13/14 (non-Mojave-compatible) format? Or is it now a forced upgrade?

Thanks for any info you might have - this is enough of an edge case that I haven’t been able to find anything on it.

Short answer, no.

If you want to share Reminder lists or use across multiple devices, then you’d have to move to the latest OS available on all of them, currently Catalina on the Mac and iOS 14 beta on your iPhone.

“Short answer: no” — meaning that there is no longer the option in iOS 14 to refrain from converting reminders to the new format, correct?

I didn’t see any option for it in the upgrade to iOS14.

And your reminders were still in the old iOS 12/Mojave format when you did the upgrade to iOS 14? Sorry to belabor this, just making absolutely sure I understand the situation. Thanks…

Yes.

But we should note that this is still a beta…

Ok, so it’s not a beta anymore!

My Mac is on Mojave and I’m on iOS13. I don’t want my Reminders to be incompatible with my Mac.

Does this mean that I can NOT move to iOS14 because it will force upgrade my Reminders?

Thanks much!

It’s fine - I am on iOS 14 and have confirmed that you are not forced to upgrade your Reminders.

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An update for all - I’m now on iOS 15, and just got a new computer running Monterey. I finally went ahead and updated the reminder format. After a brief panic where the reminders vanished from each device before repopulating over the course of a couple of minutes, no problems at all updating to the new reminder format.

Kudos to Apple for allowing folks to continue using the old format for several years after its update - the user experience around allowing users control over if and wehen to update was extremely well done.

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