Supported OS Versions

[LePips]

This is a PSA for explaining the minimum supported OS versions for Swiftfin on iOS/iPadOS and tvOS. Specific comments per each year/change may follow in this discussion.

In the most general sense, determining the minimum supported OS is a conscious choice to keep up with the pace of newer developments. Some applications are simple enough to develop and maintain that engineers determine that they can keep supporting older OSs. While it is always possible to keep the minimum version pretty low in a project while still developing features on newer OSs, this requires constant version checks and segregating portions of code for older/newer OS support. This can be very intrusive and error prone.

Swiftfin is built using SwiftUI, Apple's now-primary UI framework. The early years of SwiftUI were rough but each year the framework has been updated to bring many conveniences for building new features. These improvements are fundamental to using SwiftUI at foundational levels, where some are for convenience and some may be more of a pressing necessity.

However, these improvements are stabilizing as the framework matures, meaning there are less improvements made each year deemed necessary to be adopted. Over time, the window for the minimum supported OS may widen.

Understanding that Jellyfin is more in the "hacker" space and that older devices may be perfect for relegating to personal-media-server consumption, we still need to move forward for what is better for the development of our client. There will also be no consideration for OSs that allow jailbreaks or personal discontent with newer OS versions.

It should be known that many other clients do support older OSs - but aren't built with SwiftUI.

Determinations of dropped OSs will try to come, at the very least, months in advance. Work determined eligible for the latest Swiftfin version that supports that OS can also push that back further in time/releases schedule.

However, we can/will still support older OSs in a limited capacity to only small bug fixes on separate branches. New features and back ports will not be accepted, even if they themselves are small.

[LePips]

Release 1.3 is the last version to support iOS 15, and comments for dropping it have been made for a while. It's not that arguable that these comments could be more public, which is the reason for this discussion.

At time of writing, iOS/iPadOS/tvOS 26 was just announced. We will be planning to drop iOS 16 by the end of 2025 at the earliest. Afterwards, the minimum iOS will be 18 due to the fact that it didn't drop any device support.

tvOS will be updated to tvOS 18 minimum soon.

There will be a rough n - 2 rule to be followed, but specific release events will always be taken into consideration like the above with the number jump and device support.