Problems building Xamarin.iOS project with Visual Studio using Xamarin 3. Error 11 The maximum deployment target for iOS is 9.1

Question

We use Xamarin on Windows with Visual Studio to build our app for iOS.

We recently upgraded to Xamarin 4 and found we were not able to build. Various errors including builds hanging, Linked Away exceptions. After some effort we decided to revert to Xamarin 3 using the links on this page

https://store.xamarin.com/account/my/subscription/downloads#xamarin3 Where it says "Looking for the version before Xamarin 4? Get the latest stable version of Xamarin 3".

We now cannot build and get the following error:

**Error 178 The maximum deployment target for iOS is 9.1 (current deployment     target is 9.2).
Please select an older deployment target in your project's Info.plist.** 

In Visual Studio, this setting is selected in the project settings and the only value available is 9.2. If I try and update in the .csproj file xml, it gets overwritten.

I have had a look at all the various versions of Xamarin for Visual Studio and for the Mac (in the show all versions on the above page) and cannot find versions that will allow us to build. ie versions with the old build client with matching Xamarin.iOS versions.

Are there matching Xamarin.iOS releases still available for both Mac and windows that use Xamarin 3?

Is there a way I am missing of forcing the SDK value to match the build server?

Answer 1

For what it's worth the answer was in the error message (kind of).

The necessary update to Info.plist was adding the following:

<key>MinimumOSVersion</key>
<string>9.1</string>

This was only apparent after I had noticed that there was an editor called PListEditoryFactory, which gives a ui to edit Info.plist.

The file didn't open in PListEditoryFactory by default, so it just looked like an xml file to me.

In the ui the field needed editing is called 'Deployment Target', needs to be 9.1.

Another curveball was that the error message says that the 'current deployment target ' is 9.2, which was the value selected (and only option) in the iOS project settings TargetSDK dropdown.

What this is for and how it is different to the Info.plist setting I dont know.