We’re seeing a theme here – Samsung renamed its flagship lineup to perfectly align with the release year (Galaxy S25 for year 2025, for example), and it looks like Apple will do the same for all of its operating systems, presumably for simplicity’s sake. At least that is the plan according to Bloomberg’s report (via Engadget).
Next iOS Version: iOS 26
For its upcoming WWDC25 developer event on June 9 this year, sources told Bloomberg that Apple will unify the numbering for all of its operating systems – macOS, iOS, iPadOS, tvOS, watchOS and visionOS – with number ’26’ as the single version number for this year’s release. Why ’26’ instead of ’25’? That boils down to the version’s public release happening late each year, and in some ways it follows the same principle we refer to model years in vehicles.
To be fair to Apple, despite a big jump in numbers (such as visionOS 2 jumping all the way to visionOS 26), this is perhaps a necessary change. Most operating systems follow the yearly release schedule, and with the ever-growing numbering it can be difficult to track each of them; so by simply appending the number named after the year it was released on, it’ll simplify things for developers and users alike.
As a matter of fact, Apple isn’t the first to adopt this numbering in software versions; Windows has already labeled its OS versions with suffixes like ’24H2′ to indicate 2024 release (although internally it still uses a separate version number).
Pokdepinion: I’d imagine eventually all software with yearly release cycle will adopt this kind of version numbering.
