Old Platform Compatibility

[Sherlouk]

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With recent discussions around async/await support (a modern pattern) and potential use of other newer APIs, it begs the question of how many versions of iOS, other Apple operating systems, Swift versions and package compiler versions should we support?

Currently we support iOS 10+ via CocoaPods but iOS 9+ via Swift Package Manager (SPM). We use Swift 5.2 and the v5.2 package tools. This is compatible with anything since Xcode 11.4 released in March 2020.

Under #273 it was clearly seen acceptable to increase this to iOS 12+ and Swift 5.6 (this change was reverted for an unrelated reason!)

It's worth thinking about the fact that Apple requires upgrading your Xcode every year to the latest major version, that's Xcode 14 now (Xcode 15 from April) which means the majority of consumers will be using at least Swift 5.7

Platform statistics show that the majority of users are on iOS 15+ - though of course some apps may choose for one reason or another to support older than that.

Async/Await was backported to iOS 13+, but this isn't the only reason to have this conversation!

Where do we want to draw the line? What should our minimum OS version be? When and why should this change/be reviewed?