[3] One last update did come out in December 2020 after the launch of the Apple M1 architecture to support that and Intel Mac systems through a universal binary of the program.

StuffIt was originally developed in the summer of 1987 by Raymond Lau,[4] who was then a student at Stuyvesant High School in New York City.

Compared to existing utilities on the Mac, notably PackIt, StuffIt offered "one step" operation and higher compression ratios.

[citation needed] StuffIt soon became very popular and Aladdin Systems was formed to market it (the last shareware release by Lau was version 1.5.1).

Because new features and techniques appeared regularly on the Macintosh platform, the shareware utility Compact Pro emerged as a competitor to StuffIt in the early 1990s.

Numerous programs "wrapping" these utilities were distributed, and since these files could be opened on any machine, they were considerably more practical than StuffIt in an era when most data is cross-platform.

From the mid-1990s until the 2005 acquisition by Smith Micro Software, coinciding with the release of Mac OS X v10.4 "Tiger," StuffIt Expander came bundled with the Macintosh operating system.

However, a Classic Mac OS version of StuffIt is needed to mount the images or convert them to a newer format readable in macOS.

Programs that use the rarely implemented arithmetic coding option available to the JPEG standard typically achieve rates around 12%.)

They have also proposed a new image format known as SIF, which simply consists of a single JPEG file compressed using this new technique.

On July 5, 2005, Smith Micro Software announced their acquisition and intention to expand the new JPEG recompression technique to wireless platforms and other file formats.

This incompatibility can be inconvenient for work flows where timely execution is of importance, or where the intended recipient's system is not capable of running newer versions of Stuffit.

In versions since 10.3 (Panther), it now preserves resource forks in the ZIP format, so Stuffit is no longer a requirement for Mac file compression.

While StuffIt used to be a standard way of packaging Mac software for download, macOS native compressed disk images (DMG) have largely replaced this practice.