Apple has a habit of extracting any shared code between apps into an OS lib, and this is actually often easier to develop on internally than hosting shared deps elsewhere because all devs are constantly updating to the latest nightly OS release and therefore constantly getting the latest version of everyone else's libs.

The result is that it's basically impossible to write new code without it having hard dependencies on the newest OS! Kinda sucks for the outside world though.

Yeah this caught my eye too. I can't imagine any technical reason why a Mac works but a windows/Linux computer wouldn't work. Tbh this is the side of Apple I dislike the most - restricting things without any good reason.

And especially if you look at small organizations without much funding that use old PCs (or just have crappy IT departments)... it's disappointing. This kind of restriction won't stop a billion dollar LiveNation, but it absolutely could affect the local library or cafe.

Mostly it's a QA issue. For new features it's just much easier to ignore older OSs

It’s nice to target the most recent version so you can use all the latest APIs. Most developers would prefer to do that, but it’s usually more important to support users who haven’t upgraded. In this case they may not care too much about people who haven’t upgraded.

Devs are expected to test on the latest OS, and this is a dev tool?

Knowing Apple it’s almost certainly to have verifiable (locally generated) crypto signatures for the QR/Bar codes so people can’t make their own forgeries from screenshots