Thank you for your feedback everyone and apologies for the inconvenience caused in this instance.
To answer some of the queries:
The Xcode Image Policy was put in place at the beginning of October
Due to the recent rapid increase in Apple’s release schedule over the past year, we created the new public policy to ensure we can continue to support the latest and greatest Xcode releases quickly, whilst retaining as much backwards compatibility as possible. For an idea of scale, including betas and GMs, the Xcode 10 series (June 2018 → July 2019) had a total of 19 releases, while Xcode 11 (June 2019 → August 2020) had 30 releases and Xcode 12 (June 2020 → Present) has already reached 16 releases so far.
The vast majority of the policy ratifies the internal policies we have been following for some time, but puts into place clear guidance for customers including timelines to make sure we are all on the same page moving forward into the next year of releases from Apple.
In terms of history of dropping older patch versions, we have run through this a few times already without receiving any reports of issues both here on Discuss and via support tickets. Examples of these are when we dropped 11.3.0 and 11.4.0 in favour of 11.3.1 and 11.4.1 and dropped 12.0.0 in favour of 12.0.1. We will never automatically redirect a minor version of Xcode - this only applies to patch versions.
In this instance, it appears Apple has included changes that are more major than expected for a patch release, breaking the notion of semver. We will certainly be taking this feedback on board and introducing additional testing and checking to ensure changes to simulator support, for example, are minimal before automatically replacing a patch release and reviewing the deprecation timeline based on changes included. This should allow us to improve clarity around future Xcode patch releases.
Once again, thank you for sharing your views on this - we really do appreciate it!