Wrong minimum iOS target 12 in release notes, or breaking ANEs upgrade?

[rdefalco]

Hello, we are experiencing crashes on app startup on very old iOS devices with iOS 12.5.

Upon investigating we see that XCode16, required starting april 2025, supports "iOS 15 or later" https://developer.apple.com/support/xcode/ while on AIR release notes there is still "Minimum iOS Target: 12.0".

Also, we use Firebase ANEs that probably could have broken the compatibility as I see on the Firebase release notes that the july 2024 version required iOS 13+ and october 2024 version required iOS 15+: https://firebase.google.com/support/release-notes/ios

So I'm asking if the MinimumOSVersion should be set to 13.0 because of the ANEs or to 15.0 because of XCode 16.2 used by AIR 51.2

[ajwfrost]

This is interesting, because they seem to have retrospectively changed the supported iOS versions there... See https://github.com/airsdk/Adobe-Runtime-Support/discussions/1699#discussioncomment-11463382 where we'd checked previously and the minimum iPhoneOS was 13, rather than 15 which it says now.

However, we're still not getting any build warnings when we manually use the '12.0' value here.

If you're using ANEs then they should have their minimum supported iOS version set in the properties/settings, which would then mean the compiled binary gets set up with the appropriate value. You can see this at the end of the linker command, if you check the adt.log or the AIR SDK Manager 'troubleshooting' tab. In the ANE, look in the platform folder for the platform.xml file, and there should be a value under an <sdkVersion> tag.

Some web search results (by Google's AI summariser) suggest that Xcode can build for the older targets but can't support on-device debugging etc. But I'm not 100% sure whether that's accurate, I couldn't find any definitive source for this, it's just that I'm 99% sure that Apple have changed the minimum supported values for Xcode 16.x since they were first published..

Not sure this is a very definitive answer, sorry! We could just switch to iOS 15 as a minimum, to try to make it safer, but that might impact people for who it works, so you can always add your own minimum version into your app descriptor's InfoAdditions section (under a key <MinimumOSVersion>).

thanks

[marchbold]

Firebase minimum version is 13 I believe, so if you are using our extension you should be setting 13 in the info additions:

        <key>MinimumOSVersion</key>
        <string>13.0</string>

https://docs.airnativeextensions.com/docs/firebase/core/add-the-extensions