Apple Sets Two Deadlines to Kill iOS 12 Support on the App Store
Apps that don't raise their deployment target will be blocked from App Store Connect submission — first within months for iOS 13, then again in spring 2027 for iOS 15. Skipping straight to 15.0 now avoids duplicate QA cycles and drops support for less than 4% of devices.
Two new App Store Connect warnings signal the end of iOS 12 support. The first hard deadline, arriving within months, requires a minimum deployment target of iOS 13.0 to upload or submit any app. A second deadline in spring 2027 raises that floor to iOS 15.0. Apps still set to 12.0 will be locked out of updates entirely.
The fastest path is to set the deployment target straight to iOS 15.0 now. Over 96% of active devices already run iOS 15 or later, so dropping 12–14 costs almost no users while avoiding a second round of regression testing next year. The jump also unlocks async/await, modern SwiftUI, and newer Core Data concurrency features immediately.
After the change, teams should audit for deprecated APIs like UIWebView, update third-party dependencies that may hardcode older minimums, and verify UI behavior against iOS 15’s navigation-bar and list-style changes.
The two-step deadline creates a trap: developers who move only to 13.0 now will face the same forced migration again in less than a year, doubling their regression burden.
Apple’s 96% adoption figure makes the business case for dropping older iOS versions a formality; the real cost is not lost users but the engineering drag of maintaining compatibility branches for devices that are effectively retired.