History of IOS (Operating System)

iOS (previously iPhone OS) is a mobile operating system developed by Apple Inc. and distributed exclusively for Apple hardware. It is the operating system that powers iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, and Apple TV.

Originally unveiled in 2007 for the iPhone, it has been extended to support other Apple devices such as the iPod Touch (September 2007), iPad (January 2010), iPad Mini (November 2012) and second-generation Apple TV onward (September 2010). As of October 2013, Apple's App Store contained more than 1 million iOS applications, 500,000 of which were optimized for iPad. These apps have collectively been downloaded more than 60 billion times.

It had a 21% share of the smartphone mobile operating system units shipped in the fourth quarter of 2012, behind Google's Android. By the middle of 2012, there were 410 million devices activated.According to the special media event held by Apple on September 12, 2012, 400 million devices had been sold by June 2012.

The operating system was unveiled with the iPhone at the Macworld Conference & Expo, January 9, 2007, and released in June of that year. At first, Apple marketing literature did not specify a separate name for the operating system, stating simply what Steve Jobs claimed: "iPhone runs OS X" and runs "desktop applications" when in fact it runs a variant of [Mac] OS X, that doesn't run OS X software unless it has been ported to the in-compatible operating system. Initially, third-party applications were not supported.

Steve Jobs' reasoning was that developers could build web applications that "would behave like native apps on the iPhone". On October 17, 2007, Apple announced that a native Software Development Kit (SDK) was under development and that they planned to put it "in developers' hands in February". On March 6, 2008, Apple released the first beta, along with a new name for the operating system: "iPhone OS".


Apple had released the iPod Touch, which had most of the non-phone capabilities of the iPhone. Apple also sold more than one million iPhones during the 2007 holiday season. On January 27, 2010, Apple announced the iPad, featuring a larger screen than the iPhone and iPod Touch, and designed for web browsing, media consumption, and reading iBooks.

In June 2010, Apple rebranded iPhone OS as "iOS". The trademark "IOS" had been used by Cisco for over a decade for its operating system, IOS, used on its routers. To avoid any potential lawsuit, Apple licensed the "IOS" trademark from Cisco. By late 2011, iOS accounted for 60% of the market share for smartphones and tablet computers.By the end of 2012, iOS accounted for 21% of the smartphone OS market and 43.6% of the tablet OS market.

Apple provides major updates to the iOS operating system approximately once a year over iTunes and also, since iOS version 5.0, over the air. The latest version is iOS 7.1, which is available for the iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPhone 5, iPhone 5C, iPhone 5S, iPad 2, the third-generation iPad, the fourth-generation iPad, the iPad Air, the first-generation iPad Mini, the second-generation iPad Mini, and the fifth-generation iPod Touch.

The update was released on March 10, 2014. Before iOS 4's release in 2010, iPod Touch users had to pay for system software updates. Apple claimed that this was the case, because the iPod Touch was not a 'subscription device' like the iPhone (i.e., it was a one-off purchase). Apple said it had 'found a way' to deliver software updates for free to iPod Touch users at WWDC 2010, when iOS 4 was unveiled.

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