Apple Mandates iOS 15 Minimum by Spring 2027, Kills iOS 12–14 Support
Dropping iOS 13 and 14 removes a significant maintenance tax: SwiftUI gains, async/await, and modern system APIs become baseline assumptions, and teams can delete legacy code paths and workarounds that have persisted for years.
A developer uploading a build with a minimum target of iOS 12.0 triggered a new App Store warning: the floor rises to iOS 13.0 in the second half of 2026, then jumps to iOS 15.0 by spring 2027. After that date, any app submitted for review must require at least iOS 15.
The change lets teams drop iOS 13 and 14 compatibility without internal debate, since Apple now enforces the cutoff. Residual iOS 13 usage had already dwindled to a handful of users, but iOS 14 still held a noticeable share, especially in China, making it awkward to raise the minimum unilaterally.
For developers still supporting iOS 12, the warning serves as an immediate signal to plan the migration. The two-phase timeline gives roughly a year to shed iOS 13–14 and adopt APIs available since iOS 15.
The two-phase schedule gives teams a clear, Apple-enforced reason to drop older OS versions, sidestepping internal arguments about user share.
iOS 14's lingering Chinese user base was the real blocker for many teams, not iOS 13, so the 2027 iOS 15 mandate is the more consequential deadline.
Once iOS 15 becomes the floor, SwiftUI 3+, Swift Concurrency, and StoreKit 2 become universally available, which materially changes the default tech stack for new features.