This is required to use Swift in the iOS embedder without bundling Swift runtime libs in every app that uses the Flutter framework. Swift stable ABI was introduced in iOS 12.2, but given the low usage of iOS 12 and the effort of upgrading, we are bumping to iOS 13.

As of March 2025, usage of iOS 12 is negligible. Example public usage data shows far below 1% of users are on iOS 12.

• Bump ios_deployment_target to iOS 13.0
• Update templates and migrators to iOS 13.0
• Migrate examples, tests, and benchmarks to iOS 13.0
• Remove iOS 13.0 availability checks in embedder
• Update minimum version documentation to 13.0 on website
• Update minimum iOS version to 13.0 in packages repo

See also:

• iOS 11 → 12: ☂️ Increase minimum support iOS version from 11 to 12 #140474
• iOS 9 → 11: ☂️ Increase minimum support iOS version from 9 to 11 #101959