As a developer I’m not sure that I agree. Some degree of backwards compatibility is good, but it quickly becomes an unwieldy burden that acts as a ball and chai

As a developer I’m not sure that I agree. Some degree of backwards compatibility is good, but it quickly becomes an unwieldy burden that acts as a ball and chain on the development of the OS and platform toolkit. Among modern operating systems, iOS is probably the worst in terms of backwards compatibility but it’s also one of the most pleasant to develop for — UIKit/Cocoa is unrivaled in terms of both breadth and depth. One can easily build a top class iOS app with few or no third party dependencies, which is not the case on most other platforms. I don’t think that’s a coincidence… if the iOS dev team were encumbered with maintaining backwards compatibility for upwards of a decade it would be much more difficult to build such a complete and polished toolkit.