# SwiftUI's iOS 13 requirement creates adoption and fragmentation challenges

DevFeed: [SwiftUI's iOS 13 requirement creates adoption and fragmentation challenges](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/is-ios-starting-to-get-fragmented-25269.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://kau.sh/blog/ios-might-be-fragmented/>)

Author: Kaushik Gopal

Published: 2019-06-13T07:00:00Z

Content type: opinion

Language: en

Sources: [Kaushik Gopal's Site](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/kaushik-gopal-s-site.md>)

Topics: [iOS development](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/ios-development.md>), [SwiftUI](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/swiftui.md>), [iOS](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/ios.md>), [Android](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/android.md>), [ui](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/ui.md>), [Jetpack](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/jetpack.md>)

Tags: [android](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/android.md>), [android-jetpack](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/android-jetpack.md>), [fragmentation](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/fragmentation.md>), [ios](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/ios.md>), [ios-development](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/ios-development.md>), [jetpack](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/jetpack.md>), [swiftui](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/swiftui.md>), [ui](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/ui.md>)

## AI overview

The article argues that SwiftUI's requirement for iOS 13 creates a lengthy adoption lag and limits support for older iPhones, producing short-term challenges for iOS developers. It compares this with Android's historical fragmentation and discusses Jetpack's backward-compatibility approach.

## Source excerpt

I've been dipping my toes into some iOS development recently. Nothing too crazy, just pairing with some colleagues and trying to see how we can jointly improve the technical design on both platforms .1 It so happens that Apple just finished it's annual conference WWDC, so I've been following the announcements closer this timer around. In that process, I ran across a tweet (from Jeff Nadeau who's a developer working at Apple): Sort of blown away by the take that a min OS target is harmful to a new framework. It's absurdly small-minded; one or two years of adoption lag is nothing when the arc of such a system is measured in decades. To set a little more context: the system Jeff talks about here is SwiftUi, a new framework library that will truly change the way iOS developers write their UI code. The niggle here is that SwiftUI is limited to just adopters of iOS 13. This basically means: Since the adoption rate for new OS updates is about 2 years for iOS, iOS 13 (newest version) will take 2 years to roll out to most iPhones iPhones 6 and below will never be able to run apps built with SwiftUi (as iOS 13 will run on iPhone 6S and later only) I found this bizarrely familiar since this was the exact same problem Google had with Android2 for the longest time. It was frustrating for Android developers because we would come back all excited from Google I/O, only to have the winds promptly taken out of our sails after we reviewed the horrendous state of OS adoption. It would be pretty irresponsible to start using SwiftUi right now for app developers building apps today. I do want to make it clear: this is not what Jeff is saying. He's not suggesting everyone start using SwiftUi right now. The latter part of the tweet clarifies this: ... when the arc of such a system is measured in decades 2 years might just be the cost to pay for iOS developers to have an amazing framework like SwiftUi that will eventually make development cycles 4x better. Especially since a sea of change is m