From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is about Apple's mobile OS. For other uses, see IOS (disambiguation).
Not to be confused with eyeOS.
iOS


The iPhone 6 Plus home screen in iOS 8
Developer Apple Inc.
Written in C, C++, Objective-C,Swift
OS family Unix-like, based onDarwin (BSD), OS X
Working state Current
Source model Closed source
Initial release June 29, 2007; 7 years ago
Latest release
iPhone 4S, 5, 5C, 5S, 6 and 6 Plus
iPad 2, 3rd, 4th generations and Air
iPad Mini 1st and 2nd generations
iPod Touch 5th generation
8.0.2 (Build 12A405)(September 25, 2014; 15
days ago) []
Apple TV 3rd generation
7.0 (September 18, 2014; 22 days ago) []
[1]

Latest preview iPhone 4S, 5, 5C, 5S, 6 and 6 Plus
iPad 2, 3rd, 4th generations and Air
iPad Mini 1st and 2nd generations
iPod Touch 5th generation
8.1 beta 2 (build 12B407)
[2]
(October 7, 2014; 3
days ago) []
Available in 34 languages
[3][4][5][6]

Update method Apple Software Update
Platforms 64- and 32-bit ARM
architectures (iPhone,iPod, iPad, iPad Mini,
and 2nd gen. and higherApple TV), Apple
A4,Apple A5, Apple A5X,Apple A6, Apple
A6X,Apple A7, Apple A8
Kernel type Hybrid (XNU)
Default user interface Cocoa Touch (multi-touch, GUI)
License Proprietary EULA except for open-source
components
Official website www.apple.com/ios/
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 many of the
company's iDevices.
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 June 2014, Apple's App Store contained more
than 1.2 million iOS applications, 500,000 of which were optimized for iPad.
[7][8]
These apps have
collectively been downloaded more than 60 billion times.
[9]
It had a 21% share of
the smartphone mobile operating system units shipped in the fourth quarter of 2012, behind
Google's Android.
[10]
By the middle of 2012, there were 410 million devices activated.
[11]
According to
the special media event held by Apple on September 12, 2012, 400 million devices had been sold by
June 2012.
[12]

The user interface of iOS is based on the concept of direct manipulation, using multi-touch gestures.
Interface control elements consist of sliders, switches, and buttons. Interaction with the OS includes
gestures such as swipe, tap, pinch, and reverse pinch, all of which have specific definitions within
the context of the iOS operating system and its multi-touch interface. Internal accelerometersare
used by some applications to respond to shaking the device (one common result is the undo
command) or rotating it in three dimensions (one common result is switching from portrait to
landscape mode).
iOS shares with OS X some frameworks such as Core Foundation and Foundation; however, its UI
toolkit is Cocoa Touch rather than OS X's Cocoa, so that it provides the UIKit framework rather than
the AppKit framework. It is therefore not compatible with OS X for applications. Also while iOS also
shares the Darwin foundation with OS X, Unix-like shell access is not available for users and
restricted for apps, making iOS not fully Unix-compatible either.
Major versions of iOS are released annually. The current release, iOS 8, was released on
September 17, 2014. In iOS, there are fourabstraction layers: the Core OS layer, the Core
Services layer, the Media layer, and the Cocoa Touch layer. The current version of the operating
system (iOS 8.0), dedicates 1.3 - 1.5GB of the device's flash memory for the system partition, using
roughly 800 MB of that partition (varying by model) for iOS itself.
[13][14]
It runs on the iPhone 4S and
later, iPad 2 and later, all models of the iPad Mini, and the 5th-generation iPod Touch