Xamarin Forms - IOS minimum supported version

4
votes

After upgrading to latest XCode and Xamarin, when building in Visual Studio, I can no longer target any iOS devices older than 11. What happened?

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1
xamarinxamarin.forms
Why would you care about it? Using SDK is different with minimum support OS version. - Bright Lee
Possible duplicate of How build Xamarin against older version of iOS SDK - Paul Kertscher
@Bright Lee: Yes, completely different things, but why does the Xamarin for VS plugin always set the MinimumOSVersion in info.plist to the latest SDK version ? - fritz
@fritz Never thought about that. I thought minimumOSVersion in the plugin does not matter and it would have followed my project's setting. - Bright Lee

1 Answers

19
votes

If you want to build against iOS 10 frameworks, you would need to use Xcode 8 by setting the Xamarin's Apple SDK to point to a copy of Xcode 8.

Now via the Deployment Target within the Info.plist you can control what is the minimum iOS version that you want your app to run against.

The Deployment Target setting is used to select the minimum required version of the operating system on which your application will run. This is set in your Project's Info.plist file. You should pick the minimum version that has all the APIs that you need to run your application.

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For a Forms-based Xamarin.iOS you do not want to set the min. to less then iOS 8

Xamarin.Forms applications can be written for the following operating systems:

  • iOS 8 or higher
  • Android 4.0.3 (API 15) or higher (more details)
  • Windows 10 Universal Windows Platform (more details)
  • Windows 8.1 / Windows Phone 8.1 WinRT (more details)
  • Windows Phone 8 Silverlight (DEPRECATED)