Why Salesforce Developer Organizations May Not Contain New Features

Developer org overview

A Salesforce Developer environment gives you access to ‌a full-featured copy of Force.com, for free, that you can use indefinitely.

Use the Developer Organization to keep up with the newest features, build your own apps, and test functionalities before you purchase them. In general, a Developer Org gives you the ability to run tests that you don't want to perform in your Production or Sandbox environments.

Information on obtaining a free Developer Org is available here.

Some of the newer features may not appear in your Developer Org if it was created some time ago.

Missing Developer org features

With each release, Salesforce adds new features and functionalities to its portfolio. Features that are labeled as available in Developer Editions will be available in the most recent version of a Developer Edition. If you're using an older Developer org, new features and functionalities won't be available in your edition.

Available in: Group, Professional, Enterprise, Performance, Unlimited, Contact Manager, and Developer Editions

Generally available features

Features that require no feature or permission-set licenses will usually be present in any Developer Org, new or old. An example is Lightning Experience; this feature is present and available in all Dev Orgs. If you can't see it and want it enabled, contact Salesforce Support to have it enabled.

Licensed and Provisionable Features

Salesforce can't provision additional licenses to Developer Orgs. So, newer features that require a new type of license won't be available in your older Developer Orgs.

When you sign up for a Developer Org you'll have the licenses defined at that moment. At a later stage, when a new feature is released with its corresponding new license, it won't automatically appear in your Org. You'll need to sign up for a new Developer Organization.

If you need to test recent features that require a specific license, sign up for a new Developer environment since the most recent version contains the newest features.