iOS is a proprietary operating system created by Apple for use in its mobile devices. Formerly named the iPhone OS, a version on iOS has been installed on every iPhone, iPod, and iPad. (iPad until March 24 when iPadOS released) It remains one of the most popular mobile operating systems in the world, coming second in the mobile OS market share at 25% after Android.
History
Designed for touch input first and foremost, rather than a mouse, iOS was originally designed for the first iPhone by both the Machintosh and iPod teams. At the time, Steve Jobs either had to, in his words, “shrink the Mac” or “enlarge the iPod”. Both teams worked separately but in parallel to compete for whether the iPhone should be based on the Macintosh operating system or the iPod’s. Eventually, the Machintosh team led by Scott Forstall won the competition, leading to iPhone OS being based on Macintosh OS. iPhone OS was announced at the Macworld Expo in January 2007 alongside the first iPhone.
In September of 2007, Apple announced a new product called the iPod Touch. It was a redesigned version of the iPod with a form factor similar to the iPhone running iPhone OS.
In January of 2010, Apple announced another new product named the iPad. With the release of the three main devices utilizing iPhone OS, in June of 2010, Apple officially renamed iPhone OS to simply iOS.
In September 2019, a successor for the iOS version for iPad was announced at Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference with the name of iPadOS. It was announced that while iPadOS would be based on iOS but, would be developed separately in the future.
Jailbreaking
While the Apple App Store has become one of the defining features of iOS with its vast selection of apps for all kinds of audiences, it is not commonly known that Apple’s iOS App Store was not available in the initial release of iOS. Steve Jobs believed that with websites, there was no need to allow users to install third-party apps on their devices. Since some people disagreed with this thinking, people found exploits which allowed them to install custom software packages onto devices. Ever since Apple’s first iOS version, although the reasons and purposes have changed, there have been different workarounds and exploits used by people who wish to change, install or disable certain features of iOS. Throughout all this time, Apple has been playing a cat and mouse game with the jailbreaking community as Apple patches and fixes exploits and the jailbreaking community finds new ones.
