iOS Versions

At WWDC 2025 (June 9, 2025), Apple jumped from iOS 18 directly to iOS 26 to align with the platform's release season — the "26" represents September 2025 through September 2026, with macOS, watchOS, tvOS, visionOS, and audioOS all moving to the same year-based scheme on the same release. iOS 19 through 25 were skipped.

• Liquid Glass — a system-wide visual rewrite using a new translucent material across controls, sheets, and the lock screen. Apple positioned it as the basis of the next decade of iOS design, the way iOS 7's flat redesign was the basis of the previous decade.
• Year-based versioning across all Apple OSes — "iOS 26," "macOS 26 (Tahoe)," "watchOS 26," etc. — ending the previously divergent version numbers.
• Apple Intelligence updates: Live Translation in Messages, Phone, and FaceTime.
• Spatial / 3D photos rendered in the Photos app, lock screen, and home screen.
• Custom chat backgrounds in Messages.
• Latest point release as of this writing: iOS 26.4.2 (April 22, 2026), bug fixes and security updates.

Apple's first major on-device AI bet, with privacy framing as the differentiator from Android's Gemini-based stack. Apple Intelligence shipped in stages over iOS 18.1 (Oct 2024) and 18.2 (Dec 2024).

• Apple Intelligence on iPhone 15 Pro and newer — writing tools, image generation, summarization, smarter Siri.
• OpenAI partnership for ChatGPT-backed Siri fallback announced at WWDC 2024.
• RCS messaging support — the end of green-bubble feature deltas with Android (delivery receipts, typing indicators, larger media).
• Customizable home screen with arbitrary app placement and custom-tinted icons.
• Customizable Control Center with developer-extensible controls.
• Standalone Passwords app spun out of Settings.
• Eye Tracking accessibility on iPhone and iPad.

The most significant structural change to iOS distribution since the App Store launched in 2008 — but scoped strictly to the European Union. Driven by the EU's Digital Markets Act, which designated Apple as a gatekeeper in September 2023.

• Third-party app marketplaces in the EU (subject to Apple notarization and a Core Technology Fee).
• Alternative browser engines other than WebKit allowed in the EU for the first time.
• NFC contactless payments opened to third parties in the EU.
• Default-app changes for browser, mail, and other categories.
• Worth following whether other jurisdictions adopt similar requirements: UK CMA proceedings, Japan's Smartphone Software Competition Act, the US DOJ's March 2024 antitrust suit against Apple.

Smaller in feel than iOS 16, but with a thoughtful set of "what does the phone do when it's not in your hand" features.

• StandBy — a clock-radio mode when the phone is charging on its side.
• Contact Posters as a customizable identity card that shows on incoming calls.
• NameDrop — bring two phones together to exchange contact info.
• Interactive widgets that can run actions in place.
• Journal app shipped in iOS 17.2.
• Live Voicemail transcribes voicemail in real time.

iOS 16 made the lock screen a real place to live. Multiple custom lock screens, widgets, depth effects, and Live Activities.

• Lock-screen widgets, custom typography, and a depth effect that pushes the wallpaper subject in front of the clock.
• Live Activities — an API for ongoing-event surfaces (sports scores, ride-share, food delivery) that landed in iOS 16.1 and later powered the Dynamic Island.
• Edit and unsend in iMessage (within 15 minutes; recipients see edit history).
• Passkeys — FIDO/WebAuthn-based passwordless sign-in synced via iCloud Keychain.
• Apple Pay Later (US, eventually retired).
• Stage Manager on iPad (under iPadOS 16, but discussed alongside the same release wave).

The pandemic release. Features were tilted toward video, presence, and helping people feel less buried by notifications and meetings.

• Focus modes — a structured replacement for Do Not Disturb that filtered notifications, home-screen pages, and contacts by context.
• SharePlay for synchronized video, music, and screen-share over FaceTime.
• Live Text: select text out of any image (a feature the Pixel had since 2017, finally on iPhone).
• Redesigned Safari with a bottom tab bar (subsequently softened after backlash).
• On-device Siri speech recognition — faster, and works offline.
• Mail Privacy Protection blocked tracking pixels in Mail.
• Spatial Audio in FaceTime.

A point release with policy weight far exceeding its version number. From iOS 14.5 forward, apps that wanted to track users across other apps and websites had to explicitly request permission — and most users said no.

• ATT enforcement: apps must show the system prompt before accessing the IDFA or otherwise tracking the user across other companies' surfaces.
• Meta publicly attributed roughly $10B in 2022 ad-revenue impact to ATT — a single change in an OS update reshaping a Fortune-30 P&L.
• Unlock iPhone with Apple Watch (a COVID-era workaround for masked Face ID).
• New Siri voices and AirTag support.
• Required for using Apple's then-new privacy nutrition labels in the App Store at full force.

The home screen got the biggest rethink since iOS 7, and Apple introduced — but did not yet enforce — the App Tracking Transparency framework.

• Widgets on the home screen, with a "Smart Stack" that rotates the most relevant widget into view.
• App Library — an automatically-grouped catalog of every app, accessed by swiping past the last home screen.
• App Clips for partial-app entry via NFC tags or App Clip codes.
• Picture-in-Picture on iPhone.
• Default mail and browser apps configurable for the first time on iOS.
• App Tracking Transparency framework introduced — enforcement deferred to iOS 14.5.
• Translate app debuted.

iOS 13 is the last "iOS" on iPad. From WWDC 2019 onward iPad runs iPadOS — the same kernel, the same SDKs, but a separate brand and a faster cadence on tablet-specific features.

• System-wide Dark Mode.
• Sign in with Apple, paired with an App Store policy that required apps offering third-party social sign-in to also offer Apple's option.
• Redesigned Photos app with day/month/year browsing.
• Look Around in Apple Maps; rebuilt Maps base data in the US.
• Memoji stickers system-wide.
• Shortcuts moved into the OS as a default-installed app.
• Notable buggy launch — iOS 13.0 went out the door rough; 13.1 followed within a week and 13.2 within six.

The release where Apple visibly stopped rushing features. iOS 12 reached every device that ran iOS 11 — including the five-year-old iPhone 5s — and ran them noticeably faster.

• Up to 2x app-launch performance on older devices.
• Screen Time, daily and weekly app-usage reports, and parental controls.
• Shortcuts — based on Apple's 2017 acquisition of the Workflow app.
• Group FaceTime up to 32 participants.
• Memoji and ARKit 2.
• Notifications grouped by app.

iOS 11 reset what the iPad could do as a productivity device, and dropped the 32-bit app compatibility layer entirely.

• Files app as a real document browser with iCloud Drive, Box, Dropbox, and Google Drive providers.
• System-wide drag-and-drop on iPad — the moment iPad started to feel like it was running a different OS than iPhone.
• ARKit, the broadest-distribution AR platform overnight.
• Core ML and Vision frameworks for on-device machine learning.
• Dropped 32-bit app support: any app last updated before mid-2015 stopped running on iOS 11.
• Person-to-person Apple Pay.

The iMessage release. Apple let third parties build into the Messages surface for the first time and SiriKit opened a narrow set of domains to outside apps.

• Messages App Store with stickers, mini-apps, full-screen effects, and Digital Touch.
• SiriKit intents for ride-booking, messaging, payments, photo search, fitness, VoIP calling, and CarPlay.
• Redesigned lock screen with rich notifications and "raise to wake."
• The Home app debuted as a HomeKit dashboard.
• Differential privacy framing introduced for analytics signals.
• Last iOS to support iPhone 5 / 5c and iPad 4th gen.

An efficiency-focused release after the breadth of iOS 8. Smaller install size, longer battery life, and the first real iPad multitasking story.

• Split View and Slide Over multitasking on iPad Air 2 and later.
• Low Power Mode — the off-ramp for low-battery anxiety.
• Content blockers in Safari, which detonated the mobile-ad-blocking conversation overnight.
• Proactive Suggestions — the precursor to Siri Suggestions.
• News app launched in the US, UK, and Australia.
• Smaller OTA update size (1.3 GB down from 4.6 GB) made the upgrade feasible on 16 GB devices.

iOS 8 cracked open APIs that Apple had previously held tight. Third-party keyboards, share-sheet extensions, and document-provider extensions all arrived together.

• App extensions: share, action, today (widget), photo-editing, custom keyboards, document providers.
• HealthKit and the Health app, HomeKit framework for accessory makers.
• iCloud Drive replaced the old per-app document-store model.
• Continuity / Handoff — start an email on iPhone, finish on Mac.
• Apple Pay launched on iPhone 6 and 6 Plus alongside iOS 8.1.
• Family Sharing for purchase-sharing and shared photo streams.

The first wholesale visual rewrite of iOS. Jony Ive took over Human Interface after Forstall's October 2012 departure, and the result was a polarizing release at the time. The visual language has held.

• Flat surfaces, lighter typography (Helvetica Neue Light initially — later softened to Regular weight after legibility complaints), translucency, parallax wallpapers.
• Control Center as a swipe-up panel for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, brightness, music.
• AirDrop on iOS (previously Mac-only).
• iTunes Radio — an early streaming-radio play, retired into Apple Music in 2015.
• Touch ID on the iPhone 5s — the first practical fingerprint sensor in a mainstream phone, and the foundation for Apple Pay.
• Activation Lock as the first serious anti-theft deterrent for iPhones.

iOS 6 is best remembered for the Apple Maps launch — a switch from Google Maps that was, by Apple's own admission, not ready. Tim Cook published a public apology letter on September 28, 2012, recommending users try competing map apps in the meantime. On October 29, 2012, Apple announced Scott Forstall's departure.

• Apple Maps replaced Google Maps as the default. Quality issues in geocoding, place data, and 3D Flyover were widely reported.
• Passbook (later renamed Wallet) introduced the original boarding-pass / loyalty-card surface that Apple Pay would ride on a year later.
• The pre-installed YouTube app was removed; Google shipped its own iOS YouTube app the same week.
• FaceTime worked over cellular for the first time.
• "Do Not Disturb" mode and per-app Privacy controls (Photos, Contacts, Calendars, Reminders).
• Last iOS to support iPhone 3GS and iPod touch (4th gen).

The "PC-free" release — iOS 5 cut the umbilical to iTunes on a Mac or Windows PC. Steve Jobs's last keynote was the WWDC 2011 unveiling on June 6, 2011; he died on October 5, 2011, a week before iOS 5 shipped.

• iCloud replaced MobileMe and made cross-device sync a first-class platform feature.
• Siri launched as a beta exclusive on the iPhone 4S.
• iMessage carried OS-to-OS messages over data, eating into carrier SMS revenue.
• Notification Center replaced the old modal-popup model.
• Reminders, Newsstand, and Twitter system-wide integration.
• Wireless software updates — no more cabling to a PC for an OS upgrade.
• Find My Friends shipped as a separate app.

The OS was renamed from "iPhone OS" to "iOS" because it had outgrown the phone — iPad shipped in April 2010 running the same kernel and SDK.

• Multitasking (with a constrained list of background-execution APIs — not the full preemptive model people assumed).
• FaceTime over Wi-Fi launched on iPhone 4.
• Folders on the home screen.
• Game Center as a system-level gaming social layer.
• iAd, Apple's first attempt at running its own mobile ad network (quietly retired in 2016).
• Retina display support for iPhone 4 (3x the pixel count of the previous models).
• Trade name license: Apple licensed the "iOS" mark from Cisco, which used it for IOS routers.

The "fill in the missing pieces" release. Most of the features people had been complaining about since 2007 finally landed.

• System-wide copy-paste with the now-iconic blue handles.
• MMS picture messaging (US carrier rollout took months after the OS shipped).
• Spotlight search across mail, contacts, and the home screen.
• Push notifications for third-party apps — the framework that ATT eventually had to gate.
• In-app purchases (free apps could not use IAP until iPhone OS 3.0; the change immediately reshaped App Store revenue toward freemium).
• Find My iPhone via MobileMe and the Voice Memos app.
• Tethering on supported carriers (notably not AT&T at launch in the US).

iPhone OS 2 shipped alongside the iPhone 3G and is the version that turned the iPhone from a phone-with-apps into a platform.

• App Store launched with about 500 apps and an immediate gold-rush of indie and corporate developers.
• Established the 30% revenue split that became the central object of regulatory and antitrust complaints for the next two decades.
• Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync support — iPhone became viable as an enterprise device.
• MobileMe replaced .Mac (and launched badly enough that Steve Jobs publicly apologized to staff).
• Push-email-style support for Yahoo Mail and AOL.

The first iPhone went on sale at AT&T (then still operating under the Cingular brand) on June 29, 2007. iPhone OS 1.0 introduced Mobile Safari with desktop-grade rendering, Visual Voicemail, multi-touch gestures, and an accelerometer-driven UI.

• No App Store and no native third-party apps — Apple's official developer story was web apps in Mobile Safari.
• No copy-paste, no MMS, no Bluetooth file transfer, no front-facing camera.
• Activated through iTunes on a Mac or PC; cellular service was AT&T-exclusive in the US.
• SDK and the App Store were promised at the iPhone Software Roadmap event on March 6, 2008.