Xcode 11 backward compatibility: "UIWindowScene is only available in iOS 13 or newer"
In Xcode 11, I created a new app project from the Single View App template. I want this app to run in iOS 12 as well as iOS 13. But when I switch the deployment target to iOS 12, I got a lot of error messages like this one:
UIWindowScene is only available in iOS 13 or newer
What should I do?
Answer
The template in Xcode 11 uses a scene delegate. Scene delegates and the related classes are new in iOS 13; they don't exist in iOS 12 and before, and the launch process is different.
To make a project generated from an Xcode 11 app template backward compatible, you need to mark the entire SceneDelegate class, and any methods in the AppDelegate class that refer to UISceneSession, as @available(iOS 13.0, *).
You also need to declare a window property in the AppDelegate class (if you don't do that, the app will run and launch but the screen will be black):
var window : UIWindow?
The result is that when this app runs in iOS 13, the scene delegate has the window, but when it runs in iOS 12 or before, the app delegate has the window — and your other code may then need to take account of that in order to be backward compatible.