I think it comes down to Apple trying to avoid as much fragmentation as possible. Fragmentation makes debugging, troubleshooting, and development a nightmare. It’s not an objective good but everything has its trade offs.
So in that kind of market, this approach does reduce support costs because you just pick a target iOS version to support and test with devices running that and you know newer devices will also just work.
The other support costs it reduces is for Apple because their testing matrix for making runtime releases is drastically reduced. Which means the swift team runs more efficiently.
It’s annoying but for end users it’s even more valuable because apps are smaller (and more longevity for storage) and less memory is used.
TLDR: Apple has always run the languages this way and it works nicely for their ecosystem.
I assume you're talking about the latest iOS version for their device, which may or may not be the latest iOS version released by Apple. I was running around with an iPhone 5 until 2019ish when apps stopped working altogether.
It’s not reasonable to compare native apps to browser support. Dropping support for an older version of iOS doesn’t cut users off, they can continue to use the more recent version of your app that supports their device.
It’s especially unreasonable to compare it to people supporting Internet Explorer for a decade. Microsoft halted all development for five years and people carried on using it much longer. Apple comes out with a new major version of iOS every year and nobody is using decade-old versions of iOS.
It works fine so I don’t see a need to get a new phone, except less and less apps are going to continue to work eventually
I've been using Swift since its inception, it's been years since I've been able to pause execution at a certain breakpoint and do "po object" and get something back that is not an error.