Forget iOS 19: Apple To Launch iPhone 17 With Radical Software Change, Report Says
Updated May 29 with more details of the new OS coming to the iPhone, Mac and beyond.
Apple is about to radically overhaul the way its iPhone and other software this year, and it looks like the naming will also be massively changed, according to a new report. It'll mean that the software expected to have been called iOS 19 will actually be named iOS 26. Here's what it means — and how it will affect other products in the Apple ecosystem, too.
The next iPhones could have software with a very different name.
On June 9, Apple holds this year's World Wide Developers Conference in Cupertino, California. As part of what's predicted to be the most sweeping software overhaul in more than a decade, Apple will change its naming system out of all recognition.
Instead of iOS 19, iPadOS 19, macOS 16, tvOS 19 and visionOS 2, Apple will standardize the numbers so they all refer to a year, specifically next year, rather like the way automobiles are named for the upcoming year. This is all according to a new report from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, who claims that the change is 'to bring consistency to its branding.'
In a way, it's been brewing for a while, for example with tvOS and iPadOS already having the same number as iOS, even when the number of updates has been widely different.
'The next Apple operating systems will be identified by year, rather than with a version number, according to people with knowledge of the matter. That means the current iOS 18 will give way to 'iOS 26,' said the people, who asked not to be identified because the plan is still private. Other updates will be known as iPadOS 26, macOS 26, watchOS 26, tvOS 26 and visionOS 26,' Gurman claims.
There's a logic to this when some operating systems use one number, while others have completely different ones. If cohesion is the goal, this makes sense.
Samsung changed the names of its Galaxy S phones to match the year of release back in 2020 with the Galaxy S20. Since the Galaxy S series is announced early in the year, often as soon as January, it understandably matches the number to the current year.
And Apple has done something similar in the past when it had software products like iLife and iWork. The August 2007 releases were called iLife 08 and iWork 08, with iLife 11 going on sale in October 2020, as Gurman points out.But wait, I hear you ask, what about the naming of the macOS version?
Since OSX, as it was then called, Apple enjoyed naming Mac software after big cats, and then parts of California. In fact, WWDC always had a comical highlight when exec Craig Federighi lightly teased his colleagues in marketing for how they came up with the new name. Well, the new system doesn't preclude a suffix being added, so it could be macOS 26 Miramar, or whatever. But it doesn't seem likely. WWDC won't be the same.
What I don't think will happen is that the iPhone names will follow suit. To introduce iPhone 26 instead of iPhone 17 seems far-fetched, especially because the iPhone 16 which will certainly remain in the range would sound suddenly terribly old-fashioned. But we'll see. The first reveal is less than two weeks away.
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