Requires 13.1 ‘eh?
Yuck.
Compared to traditional computers, this race to always have your software be tied to the ever-changing underlying operating system versions is unbelievably annoying. This is particularly true when Apple releases such buggy hot garbage iOS versions
I don't see how this is at all different than traditional computers. Maybe you're too young to remember the pace of hardware/software/OS change in the PCs of the 80s and 90s. It's a plain fact of life that the pace of change declines as a technology matures and the focus shifts to newer technologies. Mobile may be maturing, but it's hardly reached the level of maturity we see in PCs.
Whether it's a new capability added to the CPU or GPU or new functions added to an OS, developers are going to adopt those new features. If they don't, their competitors will. Sometimes it's a matter of adding features/enhanced performance that's attractive to end users, other times it's a matter of greater efficiency in the development process, compactness of code (which affects bandwidth requirements for download-distributed products as well as speed of execution)...
For a new product (such as this), it's also a matter of whether you try to be backward-compatible with older OSes. It compounds the complexity of quality control/debugging for a product that contains no carry-forward/legacy code - 100% of the product is under test, not just the year's new features.
I'm quite certain, without ever using this, that Adobe is dependent on the "iPadOS" feature set/API. So it's purely a matter of whether they required iPadOS 13.0 or some later version. Do you seriously want to argue that a dot-zero should be
preferred to a dot-one release? Is anyone losing anything by updating from dot-zero to (now) dot-two, other than some of the bugs fixed in subsequent releases?
This is certainly no longer an economic issue (new app version requiring purchase of new OS or vice versa). Adobe requiring 13.1 doesn't cost you a penny more. And Adobe's subscription model means it won't matter whether Apple releases iPadOS 14.0 in September 2020 or September 2025, you're still going to pay Adobe every month - they're no longer leveraging an OS upgrade to force a new software purchase. So just forget about the days when you may have avoided upgrading your OS for a few years so that you could get a few more years out of your $600 Photoshop purchase.
And as to the pace of OS/app updates? Yeah, before the web we might have to live with bugs for months before the next set of floppy disks or CDs/DVDs was released. Patches can be pushed out much faster today - no need to accumulate a big pile of fixes before a release becomes economically justifiable. And those updates/patches are being pushed out at no charge - no retailer involvement in the distribution process. You may consider all this to be a sign that OSes and apps are buggier than they used to be, but my own feeling is that these frequent updates each contain fewer fixes than the grand, big updates of the past. In the past, if your were unaffected by a bug you could easily ignore the patch process. Now, it's in your face. You're reminded that there are bugs to be fixed, even if none of them have affected you.
